« ESCOs drive energy conservation spending | Main | Details of Microsoft's Caller ID system »
March 5, 2004
Spam turns 10...
The Register has a thoughtful historical account of SPAM. One thing they point out is that the first SPAM was actually to USENET user groups. SPAM effectively killed those groups. Now it is threatening e-mail, the killer application on the net.
I was at a presentation last night where Rob Owens, the Security analyst for Pacific Crest Securities, said that he believes the SPAM market is going to be double the web filtering market (today around $300M) very soon. And in the end maybe bigger than Virus. He recalled the beginning of Virus. People said that it was a niche idea and boot viruses weren't really that malicious. Little did they forsee all the ways to exploit vulnerabilities. The SPAMMers have just gotten started innovating...
Posted by Martin at March 5, 2004 2:33 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.nwventurevoice.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1012
Comments
Spam actually is just another great example of how "deviant" social behavior contributes to the US economic engine (this of course does not make all deviant behavior justified, it is just descriptive).
Pick most any deviant behavior, and I bet there is an economic plus, strange as it sounds. This is actually one reason why more traditional cultures would not grow GDP at high rates. With any forms of "unaccepted" social behaviors (like writing viruses), industries are spawned to counter-act their results.
The deviancy of spam will also result in huge industry growth around it. The opportunities that come about because of the worst motivations!! But, this is a real driver in our economy. If everything was so smooth socially, then we would not experience such economic booms.
Posted by: Kevin at March 8, 2004 9:07 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)