> 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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