msen hits / reactions to IBR v1n3

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1993 18:57:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv () mail msen com>
Reply-To: Edward Vielmetti <emv () mail msen com>
Subject: msen hits / reactions to IBR v1n3


I just got my Internet Business Report v1n3, here are some reactions.


Overall, I'm quite impressed with the work to date - from a content point
of view this is still right on target.


1) Jones plus ANS CO+RE.  I suspect that Jones Intercable will not learn a
lot from ANS CO+RE about the Internet, especially not much in the way of
learning how to develop a "value-added corporate presence".  There is
considerable deep-seated suspicion of and hostility to ANS in many corners
of the network, and I have to believe that they will have a hard time
picking up the necessary popular momentum to be able to offer a consumer
service.  (ANS is a lot more used to pitching its T3 net at top corporate
clients than it is at selling to the small and medium businesses that are
the likely consumers of a $150-$400/mo data cable link.)  As a sign of the
deep rooted hostility there is said to be a T-shirt seen worn in the
Silicon Valley that says


        Gotti
        Speck
        Manson
        ANS CO+RE


(So far unconfirmed - heard from an ex-DEC employee, relayed from a
current DEC Palo Alto person).


2) AOL on Internet.  One thing to note about AOL is that it's a service
which doesn't own its own dial in infrastructure; they are based on
services bought from the big old X.25 vendors dial-in modem pools.  As a
result they have had a hard time getting their whole network up past 2400
baud (9600 is top speed).  *If* you believe that the next future access
path to the Internet is via ISDN, and that people will increasingly deploy
interactive services that are tailored for that sort of bandwidth (and
certainly the animated Ford commercials you suggest would be kind of
painful at 2400 or even 9600), then the question is can AOL (and their
suppliers) keep up with the needed bandwidth?


We have seen rather large queues of mail occasionally start to build,
where mail for aol.com (and delphi.com) will stack up as their incoming
mail systems can't take the internet load.  It may simply be growing
pains, but I'm likely to guess that it in the longer run it's some
misunderstanding of just how much traffic can be generated by the Internet.


The other question to note as big commercial sites hit the Internet as
clients is whether the giant online services might need to be looked at as
the last bastion of mainframe computing.  In the 80s, you would find
corporate networks with a giant central mainframe and a host of dumb
terminals scattered about; the 90s see those mainframes being scrapped and
replaced with networks of workstations, with the terminals getting ever
smarter.  Certainly as the demand for intelligent agents and the like to
filter through the mountains of advertising mail get larger, you'd expect
that the AOL/Delphi/Prodigy/CIS model of mildly intelligent terminal
access to be challenged by relatively smart autonomous (and market priced)
access.


3) Market Presence vs Advertising.  An article just came across the wire
(Reuters "Media Giants Scramble to form More Television Networks") quoting
a CBS exec as saying that TV is becoming an "electronic Yugoslavia" with
new states springing up as fast as the deal-makers can make them.  Anyone
who has seen any small part of the Internet knows what this looks like
already :).  In this highly fragmented world, you have a setup where it's
not any big advantage to be large, so long as you can manage to cooperate
well enough to get the word out to everyone who needs it.


I was a little bit disappointed not to see one of my favorite tools for
getting market presence, the "Frequently Asked Questions" posting and ritual
observance found on Usenet.  This is a very simple tool - you anticipate
the first 10 questions that someone would ask about a product, service, or
marketplace that you are interested in, you provide credible answers and
pointers to more information, and then you post it out (appropriately
marked) on a monthly schedule to the relevant netnews groups.  It does
take some commitment to work on it, but once you have that taken care of
the posting acts as a magnet for authors, editors, trade journalists
looking for background, and generally anyone who is looking for expertise
in a field.  Unlike advertisements which people are upset about if you
post them too often, people *expect* the FAQ to come out monthly.  It's
also a great source of competetive intelligence, since you have to
maintain some amount of fairness and distance from the topic you're
covering and not make it an extended hype-sheet.


4) Advertising on the Internet.  I spent half a day trying to dig this
Schrage article out of a local business school library - you would not
*believe* how hard it is to get access to most trade rags unless you
subscribe, or know someone who subscribes.  CMP would do well to have some
kind of server on line so that readers could get tables of contents and
reprints of editorials or other opinionated materials (for a fee, if
needed).


5) PR on the Internet.  Dan Gillmor is right on target with "the Internet
is not a fax machine".


On the other hand, you know, there should be a place for an Internet
equivalent of the commercial "PR Newswire" - essentially faxed
announcements, but on line of course, and with a high enough price to post
and to subscribe that you weed out some of the crud that would otherwise
go out.  (This needs a little more thinking through to get it really
right, and I suspect you'd need to work up to a level of credibility
slowly.)  Real business news on the nets is hard to find.


6) Direct e-mail.  Here's an example of real business news that's hard to
find.  I'll be interested in how this person evades some inevitable amount
of flames - if the net doesn't find him, he'll probably be OK, but one
caustically worded, slightly incorrect message send out to the proper
combination of newsgroups could yield a barrage of knee-jerk anti-junkmail
responses.  (I should suspect that this would in fact be a *good* thing
for McBride in the long run since if he can manage to weather that storm
lots of people will know his name...)


I note that McBride is a Portal customer (his "netmail.com" address, and
also his "jsm.com" address, are tipoffs).  Portal is a service that went
through a time of being a well-known home of net.idiots (JJ () cup portal com
the most notorious), full of people who didn't have a lot of a clue about
how to use the Internet - I suspect they learned from that hard
experience.


7) Commerce on the Internet.  An interesting perspective - Seth Godin says
"Hey you out there, please experiment so that I can profit from your
advertising mistakes".  I see he's got an account on AOL, so he's not out
there risking his own capital...


There's a missing part of his "extremely difficult to collect" argument.
For some set of service providers - namely long distance telephone
companies - you don't need to use 900 numbers; it should be enough to get
people to use 1-0-NNN dialing to use a preferred long distance service and
then make your money on LD minutes.  I doubt that AT&T, Sprint, or MCI
will be the risk-takers here, but remember that there are lots of little
inter-exchange carriers out there trying to convince you to dial 1-0-NNN
before you place a call - a data service delivered by modem should be able
to tap that.  Deliver a stream of credible services and you might well get
people to switch their "1+" service over to you (after seeing how reliable
and useful you are to them), and hey there's something resembling real
money.


8) Windows NT.  NT is fine.  Does Microsoft have a way of connecting an NT
machine to the internet via modem only (with something like SLIP or PPP)?
Nope.  So the standalone NT box can't be a router for a network, and so
it's hard to put a small business who has built their net around NT on the
net by simply adding software and a modem.


I'll wait a bit, thanks.


(OS/2 is no better in this regard; Windows can be made to work up to a
point with suitable add-ons.  Novell is probably closest.)


9) Networked Information Retrieval.  There was some interesting feedback
on the "cni-modernization" mail list from the people who did O'Reilley's
"GNN" network news paper / online magazine.  The complaints were something
to the effect that the tools to deliver things were just fine, but that
the advertising didn't have enough content!  Developing a good ad via
gopher or WWW is going to be work, and the development tools are to date
bug-ugly and primitive.  Even though clients are getting better rapidly,
the grungy server code behind the whole thing (presentation software a la
Powerpoint is the sort of thing you'd consider) is likely to make the
process slow.


----


Anyway, I hope this is useful feedback.  From the bottom of the last page:


<b>Internet Business Report</b> is published 12 times a year by CMP
Publications, 600 Community Drive, Manhasset NY 11030.  (516) 562-5000.
Editor: Christopher Locke (locke () cmp com).  Technical editor: Keith
Porterfield (kwp () csn org).  Publisher: Bob Evans.  Copyright 1993 CMP
Publications Inc.  All rights reserved.  No material in this publication
may be reproduced without written permission; however, CMP can arrange for
reprints or bulk purchases.  Regualr subscription rate is $395 per year,
$450 overseas.  US funds only.


  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv () Msen com
Msen Inc., 320 Miller, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 4562 (fax: 998 4563)
    for information on Msen services contact "info () mail msen com"
           or visit the Msen gopher at "gopher.msen.com"