ClieNT SERVER NEWS
DECEMBER 13-17 1999
ISSUE NO. 329

   Microsoft Office has gone on sale as an ASP offering, unexpectedly appearing for the first time on Tuesday running on a Windows 2000 Server beta no less, as the premier service of a previously unknown ASP called Personable.com.

    Personable is the brainchild of Ben Chou, who ran Kingston Technology’s Internet business before leaving to found the Palo Alto, California-based ASP seven months ago. Kingston co-founders president John Tu and engineering VP David Sun staked Chou to $10 million, which he’s used to build a 30-man team and the infrastructure needed for Personable to open its doors.

   The fact that Personable was first to the web with Microsoft Office is probably no more than luck, although Chou figures his business plan and the fact that his company consists of more than a handful of teenagers and recent college grads with a bright idea had something to do with Microsoft’s willing-ness to cut a deal. In any case, the Personable price list is the first public look at what it costs to rent Office, rather than buy it, using the newfangled ASP model.

    Personable is asking $10 a month per user to rent the standard edition of Office 2000. The Office Small Business edition is $12, Office Professional $18 and Office Premium $25. By contrast, Microsoft’s list prices are $499 for Standard and Small Business, $599 for Professional and $799 for Premium. Actual selling prices are generally about 20% less than the list. Still, at $10 per month it would take 40 months to cover the cost of the basic Office Suite, not counting the cost of any upgrades during that time.

    Chou figures that the difference between $10 a month and a $400 cash outlay should make Office attractive enough for individual home users – the “persons” in Personable’s name – to rent.

    Targeting individual users, plus the SOHO and small business market, with standard shrinkwrapped software is the genesis of the Personable business plan. Chou contrasts that to ASPs who are targeting business customers with custom applications.

    Besides the monthly rental fee for Office, or for a host of other shrinkwrapped apps that Personable plans to roll out as quickly as it can get them under signed contracts, Personable users will pay a series of monthly subscription fees. First there’s a $5-$30 access fee, based on the service plan selected. There’s also a “computer resource usage” fee, still not completely worked out, based on the amount of computer power an application requires. Hard drive storage is free up to the first 10MB, $1 per month per 10MB after that. The extra fees will be waived for the first month for users who sign up by January 10. For their month-ly fees users get not only the applications they rent but also use of a small list of free apps and utilities that Chou says will grow quickly.

    Unlike any other ASP offering unveiled so far, Personable users also have the option of creating their files using Personable but storing them on their own computers. Chou says that focus groups Personable conducted in architecting its service showed that many people are nervous about entrusting their files to some remote web server’s hard drive.

    The local storage option is part of a framework of software that Personable has handcrafted to deliver its service. Other pieces include metering and billing routines and the all-important delivery framework. Personable has licensed core technology for the delivery mechanism from Citrix, but Chou says it’s not a standard ICA client or MetaFrame. He only says that some pieces of Citrix are embedded on both the server side and in the tiny 100KB client, actually an ActiveX control, that Personable has designed to deliver its service. Chou says that the service works acceptably fast with a standard dial-up modem, although of course a broadband connection is always desirable, especially when renting graphics-intensive apps.

    As for the Windows 2000 beta, well, technically Personable is still at the pre-launch stage, although it’s already happily booking some paying customers. Formal launch is set for March. Win2K will be out by then, one assumes.

    Lest Personable be seen as a “Microsoft” house, Chou said the young company stands ready to rent Corel’s WordPerfect Office and even give away Sun’s StarOffice. “We’ll offer them all,” Chou said, adding that his technical staff has already put StarOffice through its paces. “They say it’s very good software with a high-quality interface,” Chou reports, “but they say it’s slow and it’s not compatible with the latest Microsoft document formats.” Still, for anyone who wants it, free is free although StarOffice users will still have to pay Personable’s monthly access fees. – SZ

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