[1280] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: impact of settlements on provision of free services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stan Hanks (bcm))
Fri Aug 30 00:22:14 1991
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 91 23:24:12 CDT
From: "Stan Hanks (bcm)" <stan@karazm.math.uh.edu>
To: lixia@parc.xerox.com, schoff@psi.com
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com, craig@sics.se, stan@karazm.math.uh.edu
>>I'm not sure about this money-spending fear. Every phone call costs
>>money, but that does NOT seem to prevent people from making many calls
>>everyday.
>>Every time you turn on a light, you spend money for that, but does
>>that make anyone stay in dark?
>
>Spending money is not the problem, it is knowing how much you have to
>spend in the future - this is called budgeting. Let's work with your
>examples a bit.
Barry Shein partially hit on this. The real problem isn't budgeting
(although it's a large part of it at this point), its that we're not
dealing with Pervasive Technologies. Oh sure, *WE* have been doing FTP
and mail and all sorts of stuff for over 10 years. But how many organization
can you name where same is true for the senior management? How about the
bean counters?
As you struggle with that, consider that there are *NO* organizations
which involve technology that do not use electricity and telephony.
One of the big things I do is work to transfer "advanced" technologies
into places where they are not common. And how you define "advanced" is
all relative to where you're sitting -- FTP is pretty low-tech, but not
if you're still primarly doing batch processing on MVS/TSO where the
concept of peer-to-peer cooperating processes is pretty novel.
Not having direct personal use for something today is the primary reason
to resist spending money to experiment with it. Even if you happen to
work in the R & D side of the corporate world (another place I've paid
my dues), you -- or your research manager, if you're not one -- have to
justify what you're doing. And if you want to get enough money to do anything
reasonable, you have to be able to justify it against *things that are already
understood*.
Anyway, this is *WAY* off the original point, which can be summed up
as follows:
* usage-sensitive approaches to providing networking for academic and
research entities is probably not a good thing
* there are few commercial entities engaging in commercial transactions
across the Internet, and as a result, little experience which would
allow one to justify "expensive" flat-rate leased line services
* dial-up services greatly increase the chances that people can get
their feet wet. But they're not really fast enough.
* usage-based services are perfect, but they fill a significant gap
in the market.
Stan
