I think I'm going to give up putting a date on these issues. It seems that no sooner do I get one done and onto the server than it is time to do another.
The past couple of months have been just as hectic as the past year, but I actually feel we have accomplished things. With the one major exception of phone lines, we have managed to boost our capacity and speed by at least 400%, and have added a few new services to boot!
Wimsey has tried to maintain a balanced service to its various classes of customers. While the dialup business has been our mainstay for years, we have recently moved more and more towards providing computer services for business on our own systems as service bureaus of old used to do. These services include such things as our Virtual Post Office for E-mail forwarding, our World Wide Web services, and E-mail gateway products.
In addition, we have helped several businesses set up their own Internet facilities in various parts of North America, and are actively soliciting clients world wide.
The differences between then and now are remarkable, but the similarities are interesting too. Back then the biggest headache was support of the people who actually did the data entry work. These people were largely clerks with little or no computer background. Computer time was very valuable with one multi-million dollar computer able to run with maybe a hundred or so concurrent users (push a key and go for lunch at times). This being so, there was little wasted on making the human-computer interface easy or less than middling cryptic.
Some of the things that are happening today with the public's embrace of the Internet closely parallel these old problems. It used to be that software that hides the ugly underlying layers of the Internet simply didn't exist because it was too expensive to create for the number of people that would use it. This severely limited the entrance of people into the Internet community to only those with the perseverance or background to learn themselves.
The amount of "cotton batten" that has been wrapped around the Internet has grown rapidly in the past couple of years, but we are finding that it still isn't enough for the vast majority of people who want to participate. This brings us to the crisis the industry has faced for the past year or so in the delivery of customer support.
Initialy there was a rise in prices for the new SLIP and PPP accounts as compared to the terminal and BBS accounts - to something on the $1.50 to $2.00/hour level so that some support could be bundled in. In some cases this has proven to be far less than the actual cost of the support required.
Recently we have seen radical price competition from companies that essentially provide no support at all, living off the growing pool of customers who have now learned at the knee of the pioneers like us. The question is, where will this lead?
I think that we will see things move in two different directions at once. Some companies will move towards completly un-bundled pricing, where access and support will each have a price per hour or other unit, and services will not be included in the access price but will instead be priced separately. In this model the price for access might fall to some low price - say $0.50/hour or less, but would not include E-mail or Usenet News access for instance, and certainly would not include command line access to UNIX or WWW page placement and network bandwidth, these would be extra - maybe a few dollars each per month. The highest cost part of this is the phone line and modem, and you can see already the pricing variences among services that have higher or lower numbers of average users per line - less expensive means more chance of busy signals right up to the limit of the freenets where free means always busy and not terribly reliable.
At the other end of the scale would be the fully bundled packages including support, network access, E-mail, News, name service and domain support, WWW page creation and outgoing bandwidth, etc. - in short, a full service bureau such as Wimsey is currently. These systems would be oriented more towards those people and businesses that rely on the Internet for their daily information fix or for their business correspondance. The systems and people would be completely oriented towards providing the best and most reliable such service.
This is good for the industry, and it is good for the customer. For the industry it will broaden the base and winnow out the weak. For the customer it will provide better value for the money as competition produces niche players who excell at particular aspects that customers want. All this according to the standard laws of capitalism. The one fly in the ointment might be the various levels of government getting into the picture to spoil the picture, but I don't expect this with the drive for fiscal restraint.
All in all, I expect the next year or so to be equally as challenging as the past year. I'll let you know next year how things have shaped up.
richard
admin@wimsey.com