Well, since we're all making forecasts, here is what I think will happen
to the current free/academic/educational lists in the next couple years.
There will always be a core of 100% serious, purely academic lists
supported by the universities, by grants, whatever. Just as today. But
the universities won't be able to keep meeting the demand for the more
recreational, "half serious" lists. Some will be sponsored by commercial
interests (in fact this is already starting to happen), some will
disappear, some may turn into pay-to-read electronic magazines, but I
think the bulk of these lists will survive through private donations of
time and money by the list owners. Today, most list owners have a PC at
home and dial-up access with some sort of scheme where they pay by the
hour. The hardware to run a list is still on the high end on what list
owners are likely to have at home. But look at the 386es. They were brand
new just a few years ago, and now they're considered obsolete. That's the
kind of machine list owners have at home. In a couple years, they'll
probably have sluggish 486es that nobody wants to get near, or obsolete
Pentiums for the less unfortunate. These machines are more than
sufficient to run a mailing list. I'm also willing to bet that 64k ISDN
access will be available at affordable rates. And, as you know, LISTSERV
was been ported to Win95, which by then should have the same degree of
market penetration as Windows 3.1 today. So, my guess is that say 25-50%
of list owners will have the necessary equipment to run lists at home, at
an affordable surcharge (leaving the PC on 24h and buying the software
and/or an ISDN card). 4-5 owners could pool their funds and buy the
necessary additional hardware/software to run the lists, and off we go...
I am not worried about the free lists :-) Naturally there's a limit to
how far this can go, because a home PC may not have the reliability to
run a large list, and the list owner may not be technical enough to sort
out the system tuning problems associated with large volumes. There will
be commercial outfits offering quality pay-to-read magazines and I don't
see why they wouldn't be successful. But I think that with the
democratization of mailing lists, there won't be any homeless list in the
future. The main obstacle right now is dependable, 24h Internet access at
affordable rates. But when I see what the leading providers are doing, I
have no doubt that it will all become widely available within a year or
two. That's my 2 cents :-)
Eric
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