Re: [ubl-dev] P2P for e-business - applications?

[david.lyon@preisshare.net]

Quoting Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>:

> I've been interested, partly just pure curiosity, in
> how P2P might be used for e-business, such as
> between small and medium sized businesses
> and such as using OASIS and other open
> standards.
>
> I noticed an article on the subject
> http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/math/2006-0727-200353/Xu_05_NASM05_camera_ready.pdf
> so I gather there has been interest in it for some time
> by various groups.

Hi Steve,

It's an interesting concept.

I've actually done some work on this in the past and even demonstrated  
such capabilities at events like cebit. Some are fascinated, others  
less so.

There are a number of challenges to getting something like this up and going.

Some are technical, others are financial and the biggest ones are  
probably resistance by those in the accounting profession.

Here in Australia, I watched as the government did fund such an  
effort. What happened was that the funds went to a big accounting  
system house and promptly dissapeared. Not sure why, where or how.  
Somebody must have needed extensions to their beach house.... can only  
guess... don't know for sure..

but then the department vanished into a hole ... so no trace..

seriously though..

Most accountants seem to feel threatened by such advances from what I  
can detect.

It is as simple as they like a job where they sit down and enter figures.

Taking away that privilage is not something they seem to like to hear.

There's no reason why you can't build such a thing, but imho you have  
to build an accounting system to match. No chance to simply tack-on  
P2P-IM. It would be similar to trying to adapt a rocket engine to a  
wooden bi-plane...

In the Asian region, there would be quite strong demand for such a  
product, but they don't have very good abilities to pay. When you  
convert say malaysian ringgit to pounds for example, it's a nine to  
one conversion. So what may seem cheap to us, can be dear to them.

And in China and Indai, they seem to have reservations about paying  
for such software, prefering everything to be free. Hence open-source  
is good in many ways.

But it doesn't help when you go asking for development funds from your  
local vc to develop such a project.

There's also a programming "culture" issue in that most programmers  
are "trained" into the big-business transaction mentality.

Typcially this says you've got to have millions of messages an hour  
and MQ or something like that. They're great products of course, but  
they don't get implemented all that much in the sme world. I know I'll  
probably get corrected on that.

Point being, the skills to build such software are quite rare.

If something were to come out, I suspect that it would come from the  
asian region because what I have seen is that they really do tend to  
like that sort of stuff.

Regards

David