Revenue from desktop application sales ends with the sale. Or does it? Companies like Microsoft provide updates, fixes, and security patches to their software while developing the next revenue-generating edition. However, they don’t make another dime until they release the next edition. But that isn’t the only model.

McAfee charges an annual maintenance fee that includes daily application and virus definition updates. McAfee provides this service free for one year as part of its license. After the first year, license holders may continue to use the software, but they must pay a subscription fee if they want updates. Customers tend to pay for this subscription service in order to protect themselves from new virus threats. Thus, McAfee generates revenue long after the initial sale. In this way, McAfee behaves like an application service provider.

The following questions will help you explore the many ASP-related services that relocate applications, maintenance, and data off your systems and allow you to focus on your mission.

a. AOL offers instant messaging tools for organizations (www.aimatwork.com). Compare business-oriented tools with AIM, AOL’s free consumer product.

b. Yahoo and Google are in a heated competition for the same user base. Look up the latest developments for Yahoo at developer.yahoo.com and for Google at labs.google.com. Prepare a table in Word to compare current and beta features for Yahoo and Google. Place “Feature,” “Google,” and “Yahoo” as column headers. List individual features under “Feature” in the left-hand column. Place the symbol “•” in the cell if it’s a current feature for each competitor and the symbol “0” in the cell if it’s a beta feature. Leave the cell blank if it isn’t available at all. Give the table a professional appearance.