In-Reply-To: 
Message-ID: 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII



On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, William P Densmore Jr. wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Apr 1995 meyer@newslink.org wrote:
> Eric (and list): You are quite right to a point.

> No publisher is going to sell their PRINT content to their PRINT customers
> on a per-page basis if there is an alternative. But what if they can sell
> their PRINT content to non-customers on a per-page basis? Or what if they
> can sell original content not in their PRINT product on a per-page basis
> to both PRINT customers and non-print customers? 
Huh?  The WSJ, LAT, NYT, and 30 local papers send their content via 
"feed" every day.  The subscription for the bundle is about $30/user/month.

> And finally, what about the universe of people who have something to 
> communicate but are not presently PRINT publishers at all. Don't you 
> think a per-page model would appeal to them?

Information source abound!  PR NewsWire is a perfect example of massive 
content which rarely gets printed.  What a fortune 50 company does is 
news fit for the two pounds of pulp.  What a $30 Million corporation does 
is rarely even worth a lead paragraph in a monthly.  Investors make a 
bundle on the Newsbits of the $30-100 Million corporation.  Companies 
like Spry, NetManage, FTP Associates, NetScape, and Adobe were eclipsed 
by Novell, IBM, DEC, and Microsoft.  Which stock would you wish you had 
owned 2 years ago?

> Of course people who have been doing it one way -- very profitably -- for 
> decades, are not going to want to change absent competetive pressures. 
> But that does not mean they won't have to change, eventually, embracing 
> models like Individual Inc. or . . . .  (advertisement purposely deleted).

Until recently news retrieval systems like MEAD, Dow Jones, WestLaw, and
the like were very expensive.  A $30 million mainframe could support 
about 200 users.  The cost of production was about $3.00/minute.  
Corporations would use highly trained librarians who could find the right 
type of information in about 3 minutes and download about 6-10 kbytes at 
a cost of approx $6/kbyte over a 300 baud link.

Today, the 30,000 TCP/IP networks operate a fraction (1/64) the cost of 
an analogue line.  Trunks operate at 1/10000th the cost of analogue 
trunks because of idle time and browsing time.  Unix systems, complete 
with text retrieval software and web server capability can be obtained 
for less than $60,000.  Small daily papers can put up servers for under 
$1200 ($600 PC, $300 Disk, $60 Linux, $60 modem, $100/month slip link).

The server processing and communications overhead for http is significantly 
less than the overhead for Vt100 or 3270 interfaces as well.  As a 
result, a T1 link into a Cisco Router can support about 300 users/linux 
box or about 1000 users on a SparcServer RS-6000 or HP-9000.  I have been 
to several FTP sites with such small servers and been turned away with 
something like:
	We only allow 500 anonymous logins and they are taken, please try later.

When I do get connected, it turns out the machine is a Sparcstation 5 
with three 2 gig SCSI drives.

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr 19 19:00:10 1995
Status: O
X-Status: