From: burley@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: PRODIGY - Speed, Cost, Usefulness, etc.
Date: 27 Aug 92 21:36:24 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Free Software Foundation 545 Tech Square Cambridge, MA 02139
In-reply-to: drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com's message of 27 Aug 92 08:00:47 GMT

In article <1947@coyote.UUCP> drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com (Sam Drake) writes:

   1.  Robert's analysis is as true for Prodigy as it is for ANY advertising-based
       activity.  I wonder is he is as morally outraged by advertising in other
       forms?  Does Robert recommend the abolition of TV, radio, newspapers,
       and magazines, too?  (That darned Scientific American, they won't sell you
       a copy without the ads.  How arrogant of them.  Start a boycott.  ???)

First, Robert didn't seem morally outraged to me.  He just seemed to be
clearly (and, indeed, aggressively) spelling out the truth of the situation.

And Prodigy does have differences from the other media you list.  TV and
radio, as broadcast media, are free to anyone with a receiver; here, while
the advertising does slow down the delivery of information, it isn't charging
"product" (to use Robert's terms), i.e. viewers/listeners, for the privilege
of seeing/hearing both the advertising and the "useful" information.  With
newspapers and magazines, skipping the ads not only is faster when compared
with those other media (and with Prodigy; when I used it, ads took a
significant portion of the time needed to interact over the modem), but are
easier to carefully examine, save, and make decisions on.  (With Prodigy,
as I recall, and unlike TV and radio, most or all ads are designed so that
you take advantage of them _online_, i.e. with little or no opportunity for
comparative or analytical shopping.)

   2.  The revenue that Prodigy takes in from advertisers helps pay for the
       service.  Specifically, it's what allows Prodigy to be flat-rate,
       with no connect time charges.  Consider ... on most online services
       if you connect for a long time, you cost them more money ... so they
       charge you more money.  On Prodigy, the longer you connect, the more
       ads they show you, and the more revenue you bring to Prodigy.  This
       extra revenue offsets the cost of you signing on, so they can afford
       to let you on with no connect charges.

   Some folks would rather pay connect charges than see ads.  That's OK.
   But for others, it's a reasonable tradeoff.  Me, I can ignore ads,
   but just wouldn't pay connect charges to use a service.  So for me,
   Prodigy's rate structure ... enabled by its ad revenue ... makes it
   a good choice.

Yes, as a one-time Prodigy user, I appreciated the fact that its slowness
wasn't a way to increase its charges to me.  But it was so underpowered and
slow that even the low rates weren't enough to keep me on the service
forever; and the complete disregard they showed for their "product" when
they decided to start charging for e-mail, and how they managed (or mis-
managed) that whole fiasco, caused me to sign off forever, despite having
enjoyed it quite a bit.  I haven't looked back, of course; I'm on The Net.
Just wish I could get the rest of my family on it as easily as I could get
them onto Prodigy.  And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, because the
e-mail fiasco showed that they could easily decide to start charging
extra for using services they currently claim to offer as part of the
flat fee, such as, say, the on-line encyclopedia, or access to bulletin
boards (aka newsgroups), or whatever.  While I appreciate that it might be
a service whose price/performance/ease-of-use might be attractive to many
people, I think the lack of decent "product" (customer) relations makes it
not worth recommending it to friends _or_ enemies.
--

James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF)