By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

There are a couple of big stories regarding consumer P2P today. Trent Reznor, fed up with his label's pricing of his albums in Australia has told his fans directly that they should "steal it," at a Sydney concert. A video of the concert, leaked to YouTube, made it to the front pages of many social news sites.

I can't endorse Reznor's suggested course of action, but I'm not going to not endorse it.

At the same time, e-mails leaked from MediaDefender, a company that patrols P2P networks looking for copyright violators, showed that, despite MediaDefender's prior public assurances, they were operating a video uploading site called MiiVi, which many suspected was a "trap" to lure copyright infringers - among other concerns.

And with all this coverage of P2P technology in the news, I thought - what ever happened to those promised P2P corporate networking apps? Back in 2005, Network World mentioned "Groove Networks Virtual Office." In that story, the author states:

"With the adoption of Globus 4.0 as the new XML-based protocol standard, grid services will become the P2P of Web services…."

"Be forewarned, get educated and be prepared for the network implications of corporate IT P2P applications. The corporate next-generation network future may be just around the corner in 2006."

Searching for Groove Networks on Google leads to Microsoft's Web site - It's an add-on for Microsoft Office now. Not surprising, as Groove's founder, Ray Ozzie became Chief Software Archetict at Microsoft. (He was also the brains behind Lotus Notes)

I looked up Globus as well. Globus's is more of a project to create a computing grid of corporate network computers - which is a pretty cool idea. 90% of the time, I'm not using 100% of my dual-core processor computer here at work. The other 10% of the time, I really could use more processing power to render video. If there's a way to grid-together peer-to-peer corporate computers so that everyone gets the power they need to do their jobs, sharing CPU power over the network.

Still, I don't think most companies are ready to go that far - mostly, I think, they just want their files faster and their latency lower.

So, where are the corporate P2P applications? Maybe I'm overlooking them (and if so, I'd love for contributors to point out projects to me in the comments) but it seems like this is an area of technology that was abandoned too quickly, and maybe deserves reexamination.

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(N.B. We tried to contact Ray Ozzie at Microsoft for his thoughts on this matter, but was told by a representative of Waggener/Edstrom that Microsoft was unable to participate in this particular opportunity at this time.)