Found this on ZDNET:

Follow the Loser: HP Chases Lotus Down Dead-End Path
URL:
http://chkpt.zdnet.com/chkpt/adem2fpf/www.anchordesk.com/story/story_2612.html

Berst Alert
Jesse Berst, Editorial Director<BR><I>ZDNet AnchorDesk</I>
Monday, October 05, 1998

Like Lotus before it, Hewlett-Packard is headed down a
dead end road.

Don't go along for the ride. Or you could slam into a
career-ending wall.

HP is promoting the notion that giant corporations will
stop building and buying business applications. Instead,
they will supposedly lease them. Or rent them on a pay-per-usage
basis.

Wow, is that wrong. Dead wrong.

HP refers to its strategy as "apps on tap." In a conference
last week, it described a plan to collaborate with companies
such as Cisco and Oracle to create an "information utility."
Lotus rolled a similar strategy last spring with its "rentable
applications" idea. Click for more.

Here's why this idea will never work for big corporations,
and will have problems even with smaller firms:

Business strategy. Over the next decade, technology will
be the number one way to gain competitive advantage. In
any industry. In every industry.

If you lease your mission-critical applications, you are
putting your future in the hands of an outside company.
Sure hope it does things right. Sure hope it gets things
done on time. Sure hope it doesn't lose your data. Sure
hope it doesn't reveal your "secret sauce" to its next
customer. Because if it screws up... you go out of business.

Would Coca-Cola trust an outside company to come up with
new soft drink recipes?

I think you see my point.

Individual psychology. Rentable apps will also languish
for the same reason flat-rate Internet access and flat-rate
cable are vastly more popular than pay-per-use and pay-per-view.
People hate to feed the meter every few minutes. They
don't like the feeling that the clock is ticking in the
background. Imagine if you leased your word processor.
Every time you took a coffee break, you'd be racking up
charges. Tick, tick, tick.

There's plenty of potential in the information utility
idea. Companies such as Microsoft and Netscape seem to
be getting it right. "It doesn't matter if they buy or
outsource," says Marc Andreessen, executive vice president
of products for Netscape. "We are going to let them choose."
Click for more.

That's the idea. Let them rent if they want, buy when
they are ready. Smaller companies may indeed start by
outsourcing their non-critical functions. There's a place
for the Kinko's of the Internet, as I explained just a
few days ago. Click for more.

But you don't expect the Boeings of the world to bet their
businesses on Kinko's. And you shouldn't expect big corporations
to outsource mission-critical Internet applications either.


--
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 Paul Edwards                     HP 3000 Certified Consultant
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