I'd like to add two other ideas; one from the personal/domestic (hobby)
view, and the other more corporate.

I run two fairly busy but very small mailing lists from a LISTSERV Lite
Free Edition server on a virtual Linux.  This costs me less for the virtual
Linux instance per month than hosting one list at EASE-HOME sadly.  I did
ask sales for a quote for a real licence of LISTSERV Lite and it was so
high I couldn't use. You'd need to be a fairly large business to afford -
luckily for us we are only domestic / social use so the Free Edition works
well for us.

From the corporate angle - I work for a Fortune 500 and the big push is to
cut down on email that is pushed to you. Items delivered to an inbox have
to be urgent - most staff are mobile and a lot of email is read on mobile
devices (Android, iPhone, Blackberry).  We've moved to web based "pull"
collaboration - IBM's Connections product is like an internal Facebook with
a lot more capability.  Other companies are using MS Sharepoint type tools
or even free web forums.

I'm in the UK, but I gather the same has occured in the US - high(ish)
speed always on internet and wireless connectivity has meant that people
are quite happy to use web forums instead of writing emails - the same
information but in a different medium.

Now I'm a big fan of NNTP and Email - and I dislike a lot of web forums as
they're hard to navigate and full useless images ; low "signal to noise"
ratio in my experience. But the flashy graphics and web access seems to
sell.


James


On 25 May 2012 17:36, Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > Over the past 3 years or so, I've noticed that a number of long-
> > standing email lists are switching away from Listserv to other
> > platforms -- presumably because they're cheaper.  I can understand an
> > organization's desire to keep costs down - but Listserv is miles ahead
> > of all the other packages I've come across.
>
> It is rarely because of licensing costs. These organizations typically pay
> between $2,500 and $4,000/year for LISTSERV, which is a drop in the bucket
> for a university (I guess you are talking about lists hosted at
> universities), and far less than it will cost them to switch to another
> solution.
>
> Sometimes it is because the organization has decided to outsource its IT
> to Google because Google helps them "make a bigger difference on campus and
> around the world." I suppose the fact that Google offers to do all this for
> $0.00 has nothing to do with the decision ;-) LISTSERV is usually part of
> the package that gets tossed into Google land, and we let the list owners
> know that they can buy individual lists from us. This is very inconvenient
> for them though given the "weight" of their local procurement system. It is
> better for us to try and convince the customer to keep LISTSERV in-house,
> which is sometimes successful and sometimes not. Our challenge is that this
> is such a big migration for the organization that people are overwhelmed.
>
> More often than not, organizations abandon LISTSERV because central IT
> divisions are cutting down on the services that they offer. If there is a
> FREE service out there, why should the IT department offer it? You can set
> up e-mail lists for FREE on Google or Yahoo, and of course there is
> Facebook. The goal is not to save a few thousand dollars a year in LISTSERV
> license fees but to cut costs on a much larger scale. This is not always a
> bad thing for L-Soft financially. We can end up selling several
> departmental licenses or hosting services bringing in more revenues than
> the central license used to. Unfortunately, this rarely ends up covering
> 100% of the lists that used to run under LISTSERV.
>
> It seems that we live in a society where costs keep being pushed
> downstream no matter the consequences. I remember the days when I could buy
> a server, rack it, connect the power plug and hit the power switch. Today
> there is nowhere to connect the power plug... The PSU came in that other
> box over there. The memory isn't installed, the DVD isn't installed, the
> second processor isn't installed, the cables aren't connected, the RAID
> isn't installed, the drives come in an impressive collection of huge boxes
> containing smaller boxes containing drives fitting in a shirt pocket...
> Nobody can afford to pay someone at Chinese labor rates to assemble this
> stuff for me, when I can do it at a cost of $0.00 to the supplier.
>
> For one-way HTML newsletters, we have a new service that is currently free
> because the credit card billing module isn't ready - if you have
> chronically low blood pressure, I can highly recommend developing code that
> has to interface to a bank :-)
>
> http://www.kayvu.com
>
>  Eric
>
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