Posted by Mike Perkowski
In the mid-90s, it was Web browsing. By 2000, it was CRM. More recently, it was managed services. But I’m here to say, without reservation, that the number-one application for the Web today is……Fantasy Football.
For those who think that Fantasy Football is nothing more than the most vivid example of men failing to get past their inevitable state of arrested development, you’re wrong. (Well, mostly so.) FF may be the greatest way to use up all that bandwidth the industry built out before the Internet bubble burst — at least from late August through early February, when the football season is raging.
FF is single-handedly driving sales of servers, network management and monitoring software, security software and myriad end-user devices that allow FF “team owners” to manage their empires on a minute-by-minute basis. And when Sunday comes around, all the data centers used by CBS Sportsline, ESPN and others had better be tuned to within an inch of their life, or else they risk system crashes that will incur the wrath of something like 92 percent of men, and a lot of women too.
Sure, the non-believers may think it’s frivolous, but think of how we have single-handedly put to work all that DASD that’s been laying dormant since we hit NASDAQ 5000. We FF devotees even have combined to render dial-up 100 percent dead as a floppy drive. Ater all, when you’re competing with your buddies during Football Sundays (and Mondays, and sometimes Saturdays and Thursdays), your biggest enemy is….network latency! You can’t wait 8 seconds to make that last-minute lineup change when the deadline for roster moves approaches. Give me a T-1 connection or I’m doomed! Or else, I may be stuck with a QB on my roster who is going to jail.
