Mon, 23 Jan 1995 13:11:17 +0100
|
I think if you took a step back from the issue you would realize that
this not only was bound to happen, but is a perfectly normal and
justified development. More and more people are getting connected to the
Internet and want to use e-mail as a vehicle for information they used to
get by FAX, snail mail, etc. I suppose we would all agree that this is a
good thing. Well then, what are information providers supposed to do?
They need to charge for the information in order to be able to produce
it. If they can't charge for it when it's delivered on the Internet, they
can't deliver it that way and they'll have to keep wasting paper just so
that they can collect the money they need to prepare or compile the
information. The Internet is unique in that, unlike other media, it
started as a 100% free (to the end user) service. This was possible to a
large extent because of government subsidies. This model clearly doesn't
scale up and people have been doing business over the Internet for
several years already. I mean when a customer writes to me to report a
problem and I answer, we've saved an expensive phone call and none of us
has really contributed anything to the people who help configure and
manage the mail systems we've used (all right, in this particular case
the correspondants usually *are* the people who manage the mail systems
in question, but you get the point :-) ). What happens when we do that is
that we decrease costs, and this translates to reduced software bills for
everyone's benefit. Everyone wins except AT&T :-)
Eric
|
|
|