What ever happened to push? It went underground – or at least got embedded. There’s very little actually being pushed down to paying subscribers – ComputerWire doesn’t use push. And the boom in delivery of news services push technology was supposed to deliver never materialized because everyone uses the portals for news. The portal and point push company PointCast which has 1.5 million subscribers – has shelved its IPO, and Meta Group thinks it’s likely to get bought by one of the news services such as Desktop Data. Meta offers further evidence push is out: Wayfarer’s acquisition by Vantive, and DataChannel’s focus on web content management and XML. BackWeb, the researcher says, has become the only remaining pure push vendor, and we expect it to focus on channel development versus direct customer markets.
