On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, Adam Rifkin wrote:
> NEW YORK - A $150 dinner at a five-star restaurant will always win the taste
> test against a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese made for $1 at home. The
> price on any product or service should reflect its value.
Oh if bits were atoms...
I could easily setup a box and provide email/file/web/chat/schedual type
things for say 1000 of my closest friends for the cost of a DSL line, and
some old hardware I already have - so can everyone on fork and probably most
of the slashdot kiddies too. So I should be able to extract about two bits
or so a month from people and still be ahead enough to buy some root beer.
The cost of billing is higher then what the services are worth. That's why
they are and will remain free. Burned by the C-word... commodity, the
horror. The electric companies out here in california were smart enough to
figure this one out ahead of time, too bad the geeks didn't.
Yes, Yahoo, Microsoft, dot-net and everyone else is trying desperately to
find "premium" services to charge for... but WHAT? My mom uses the computer
for email, web(read-only), and chat, that's as far as any of my non-geek
friends get. Guess who provides their email, and their web sites, and even
their dialup - none of them use it much, so all my non-geek buddies preaty
much piggyback. The megacorps really think people will pay for this stuff,
and if you think a real company is gonna outsource a critical and
information sensitive resource...
Man, do I have some land in florida to sell them!
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:53 PDT