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On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, Donovan White wrote:

> Forget the Web. The fact that nobody looked anywhere else may reveal a
> nearly fatal flaw of this online-news list. It is incredibly Web-oriented.
Actually, we should probably move this whole dialogue to one of the 
news-groups.  We just got a post addressed to about 5 alt.journalism.* 
groups.  This list is primarily supporting those who don't have access to 
usenet/news or don't know how to use it, or get overwhelmed by the 14,000 
groups.  Someone pointed out that 140 megabytes/day goes through the 
net.  That's compressed (clips are compressed into a few bytes).

> People have been merrily purchasing away on the proprietary services for
> ages. - Millions of people, I think. I know I have. I got front-row seats at
> the circus by Prodigy - the best seats I ever had. And now I tell everybody
> that Prodigy's the place to go for event tickets. I never buy tickets to
> anything without checking out Prodigy first. My initial purchase was a
> response to an ad on a Prodigy screen. 

Many people disliked prodigy's "cheezy graphics", but they work!
It's no wonder Prodigy went to a web interface.  I'm looking forward to 
the day when I can go to page "http://www.prodigy.com" via my internet 
account.  I will welcome DES or RSA for those transactions.  I would even 
pay $20-30 for a secure Web Browser with encryption built-in.

> There's a guy who made millions by starting PC Flowers on Prodigy. So if you
> want to know about purchasing in response to online ads - don't ask Webbers
> - they don't know from secure transactions, they don't know from ad
> campaigns - ask the folks at Prodigy - they've been doing ads and secure
> transactions since the get-go. I'm sure the P* marketing department will
> drown you in a flood of information about how effective their ads are. 

You forget the 40-50 $40 Million/year companies like PKWare, ButtonWare,
and Ziff-Net vendors who make 90% of their sales from the 5% who register
their shareware.  Microsoft is entering the "grey edges" of share-ware 
distribution with Windows95, Winsock, and the Developer's program.

We forget also about the "subscription software" packages offered by 
several Unix companies, consulting firms, and VARs.  We used to pay 
$2000/server to have a guy come in once/month and install the latest 
versions of GPL software.  We could get the source for free, but it cost 
40 hours of a $75/hour engineer to babysit the compiler.  Even for 6 
servers, it was a bargain.  We got great software, he made enough to buy 
a house in Boulder and a Porche.

	Rex Ballard

From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr 19 19:49:51 1995
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