Why it's hard to write successful P2P software

The answer is simple, the rules are always changing. Designing good P2P software is hard because it's based on anticipating too many different factors. One example is that you have to anticipate the Internet, which is hard. You have to predict which protocols to invest in (TCP vs UDP). It's not hard to imagine a future Internet where UDP traffic is blocked. If ISPs and govts find it easiest to block P2P because it makes sense economically they will. If for example, blocking UDP will cut illegal downloads by 50%, ISPs would drop it in a heartbeat. I'm predicting a future Internet where on HTTP is allowed, and everything is firewalled. Basically, ISPs may make it impossible for end-users to host any service and if you think about, most P2P software work on the basis of hosting some kind of services (or binding to a specific listening port). ISPs can make it so that we are only able to initiate connections to servers that host services. The end users essentially becomes a second-class citizen on the web, and only big corporations have resources to host services. With everything going to the cloud, it seems like everyone is pushing for all services to go through a service provider essentially making it impossible for end-users to be their own service providers. For example, in a social version of Dropbox, I can find a cloud of my friends running a storage backup service, I connect to them and back-up my stuff on their computer and in return they can do the same on mine. It's like the people powering the people, but economically it does not make sense because in this scenario, there is no big corporation making tons of dollars. This would actually hurt ISPs the same way P2P software does since users are exchanging traffic among themselves. There are many other factors that I dont feel like going into right now. I love p2p, I love the concept of people-powered services, but I'm learning that even Skype may not have a bright future, so the future of p2p services is bleak, but that's probably not going to stop me from loving it and taking on the challenge. Challenges help keep life exciting, sorry no boom today.