[9741] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
RE: Sizing the Internet market
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lloyd Brodsky)
Wed Jan 19 00:23:29 1994
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 1994 22:22:04 -0700 (MST)
From: Lloyd Brodsky <lbrodsky@rocksolid.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com, ddern@world.std.com
On Tue, 18 Jan 1994, Daniel P Dern wrote:
> With all due respect to Lloyd, I get 1-3 calls or msgs like
> this per week (averaged out),...
<some text deleted>
>
> This sure would be useful info to have, yup yup. Sometimes I
> take 10 minutes to explore why the #s are large and semi-meaningless
> (billions and billions... but how do you define 'an internet user'...
Actually, what I was asking about was the likely number of qualified leads
for Internet, not the number of current Internet users.
There are clearly some attitudes and aptitudes people had probably better
have before they would find any use to the benefits the Internet
currently offers -- and if they don't either the Internet industry will
have to forego their business or change its offerings (with the two not
being exclusive, of course). I propose the following initial list:
1. You have to be able to read and write. (This eliminates
the hefty percentage of adults who are functionally illiterate and a lot
of children. This is a movable barrier -- you could have icons with
people's faces and click on them to hear their last comment or use the
Internet to deliver MTV -- but right now I believe literacy is an absolute
requirement).
2. You have to own or have access to a computer with a modem and a
telephone line or an Internet connection. (Obviously this can be fixed
with a grand or so or by enrolling in a school with Internet access or by
getting a job which gives you access -- but this rules out the 6-7%
unemployed and the equivalent number of working poor. This could be fixed
with some kind of Federal computer stamp program.)
3. You probably need to feel some level of dissatisfaction with the
amount of information and/or social interaction you currently have. (I
have had more than one student in my business school teaching career tell
me since their boss told them everything they needed to know on the job
and they knew everything they needed to know off-the-job what did they
need the Internet for? Given their assumptions, their analysis is
flawless. I have the hunch that if you ran a Myers-Briggs personality test
on a decent sample of net-dwellers that the distribution of personality
types would be different from that of the general population and would
cluster around a subset -- but that's a hunch.
4. You probably also need to have a predominantly read/written (as
opposed to oral/aural) cognitive style to get satisfaction out of using
the Internet. After all, if somebody's style of resolving information
opposed to, say, going to the library, asynchronous written communication
may be quite unsatisfying.
5. Some experience with character-based operating systems with
hierarchical file structures (AKA DOS or UNIX) seems to be highly
correlated with an ability to learn how to operate some of the
even-less-friendly Internet application. This hypothesis is based on some
solid evidence. I introduced a DOS screening exam in the Intro MIS class I
taught which called upon people to do things like create a subdirectory
and copy a file into it. The first time we tried this (two years
ago) one-third of the students that showed up on the first day never
returned (which has since dropped to 20% on average) and the percentage of
students expressing high levels of dissatisfaction with the class (which
had an hands-on Internet assignment every other week) was virtually
eliminated. I sensed this was a major problem when a student came to me
after (he said) having spent thirty hours trying to complete an FTP
assignment with an error message that said he had been trying to retrieve
a directory. When I pointed out that he probably wanted to retrieve a file
instead he asked me what the difference was. That individual would
probably not have been interested in paying for an Internet account.
I can also contribute three other pieces of info that lead me to be less
than wild-eyed about the ultimate demand for current Internet services.
One is that given a choice of telnetting into Dow-Jones News Retrieval for
$30 vs. telnetting into a free library catalog for an assignment 3 out of
45 people went for D-J (This in a population of graduate students in
business with full-time jobs). The second is that although 85% of my
students took me up on an offer to have their accounts extended for a year
at no charge some spot-fingering the following semester suggested that
only about 15% had EVER logged in again. Finally, I polled some classes
about whether they would be willing to spend $15 a month for unlimited
Internet service after graduation. About 15% said they'd pay.
* Lloyd Brodsky Internet: lbrodsky@rocksolid.com *
* President, RockSolid Communications *
* P.O. Box 101804 Voice: 303-758-7030 Fax: 303-758-7277 *
* Denver, Colorado 80250-1804, USA *
