From: Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Date: Thu Sep 07 2000 - 11:18:36 PDT
> What this says to me is that the traditional stuff timesharing setups
> used to charge people for is now all irrelevantly cheap for ordinary
> use.
I had been tempted to reply to an earlier FoRKpost with:
> My pocket change can interact with a vending machine. I could
> drop a buck and have the can drop into the dispenser, without
> any handsets. (plus, change folds better than a phone)
when I realized that, when I was a kid, change wasn't folding
money. Now, of course, it's the small bills that result from
breaking an ATM token.
Could it be that $20 is pretty much the minimal billable
increment these days? Come to think of it, that may even
be too low a figure; many services these days try (in a
variant on the fixed-price scam) to lock their users into
much longer term contracts, thereby increasing effective
transaction size.
-Dave
(I was pleasantly surprised to note that my old water
company had given some thought to the matter, saying
they wouldn't bother billing for trivial amounts. How
much that extra logic cost them to develop and support,
I don't know, but no doubt much less than the annoyance
saved on the part of their customers.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 17:42:35 PDT