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	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.


On Thu, 18 May 1995, Suzanne Lainson wrote:

> I'm always amazed that AOL has been saying (publicly at least) for a long
> time now that everything is going along just fine.  I think there was a
> discussion in this group at least 6 months ago about the fact that the
> commercial services weren't offering an attractive enough deal to content
> providers.  The representatives of AOL who responded never seemed to
> address the issues.  They tended to offer simplistic PR spins on the
> potential problems some of us saw coming.
> 
> Do you think they were deluding themselves as well?

AOL, Prodigy, and CIS have been developing their own concepts of their 
roles on the internet for almost 2 years now.  Obviously, there was no 
desire to push people into the highly competitive internet, but at the 
same time, there was no question that ultimately the Internet 
Infrastructure would eclipse the self-contained on-line service.

AOL, Prodigy, and CIS (and others) can provide such features as "bulk 
purchase" agreements with commercially oriented web servers.  There is 
also the probability of much more aggressive use of really high quality 
advertizing.  The logo/button will be smaller and less intrusive, but 
will open up to some very high quality advertizing.  The ad execs of 
the internet will be masters of games like "Dungeons & Dragons", 
inviting the customer to "Explore" their "Worlds of opportunity".
I know a few "games masters" that will do very well.

The important thing to remember is that we are dealing with a generation 
(20-35) for whom video-games, computer-games, and role-playing games were 
a natural and normal part of growing up.  These "joystick jockeys" guided 
missles through the doorways of military installations and through the 
tailpipes of highly maneuverable jets.  They play 7 layer dungeon games 
like DOOM as if they were playing in their own living room.

To this "Slacker generation", who build businesses using cellular-phones 
and notebook-computers, the Web/Internet is just a natural extension of 
the whole "game of life", which they play very powerfully.

> Suzanne


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon May 22 23:09:17 1995