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Dead Man's Company.
By Anubis
<RANT WARNING = "This is a rant. You have been warned"></RANT>
THE DEAD MANS COMPANY
There have been many sudden and unsuccessful moves by the
corporations of America to try to capitalize on the Internet.
They have all failed for one reason or another. These failings
were obvious to me, they were obvious to most of the users. But
somehow these big corporations, with their huge research and
development departments are blind to the obvious. Here is the
obvious.
SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES
One of the most popular ways for companies to try to generate
a revenue stream is by charging a monthly subscription fee for
their services. These services almost always tank. Big companies
are always so stoked about consumers paying a monthly fee to
use their cell phones and paying a monthly fee to access WAP
enabled pages, and paying a monthly fee to view webpages on their
Palm, and paying a monthly fee to get interactive TV, and paying
a monthly fee to host their website, and paying a monthly fee
to use a copy of Microsoft Office, and paying a monthly fee to
access a news website, and paying a monthly fee to use the internet
on their web enabled toaster, and paying a monthly fee to access
some other companies website, and paying a monthly fee for a
custom email address, and paying a monthly fee to have broadband
access, and and so on. Am I the only person that sees the fatal
flaw in this?!. The consumer is not an infinite money well! The
consumer has a fixed amount of money available to him each month.
And it will never ever be possible for companies to get 6000
dollars of monthly fees out of a person who only makes 2000 a
month. Realistically even a person who makes 6000 dollars a month
is not going to spend 6000 dollars a month because said person
will never give up food, water, or electricity to be able to
download 150 kilobytes of text a month on his Palmpilot. There
is only a certain amount of money available from the average
consumer for use on monthly bills, and much of that money is
already consumed by power, water, telephone and other services
instated by companies before the internet even existed. It is
physically impossible for most of the subscription based services
to survive, simply because there is not enough money out there
to pay for them. And a company who has chose to make money by
selling subscriptions to its news website would do well to remember
that not only is it competing with other news websites, but with
WAP phones, Palm Internet, Microsofts .net initiative, Cable
TV, the landline telephone companies, the city water service,
and the electric companies for a share of the consumers limited
monthly wallet. The chance of survival against so many powerful
foes is slim indeed.
MICROPAYMENTS
Another business plan I hear paraded around a lot is the micropayment
system. Basically the micropayment system is where every time
you view the CNN news site or listen to that Peter Franpton song,
or watch the "bullet time" scene in the Matrix, Corpland
charges you another 50 cents. There are a number of reasons why
this is complete bullshit and will never work. Reason number
one is that it requires everyone to be a 9 to 5 billable asset
tied to a single computer. Unfortunately many people in the real
world do not fall under that category. Many people have platforms
other than Microsofts OS, or access the web from more than one
computer. or do not have billable assets. Microsoft Passport
is a means to try to get around this problem, to allow any site
to bill any Passport user when they visit. Of course this will
most likely only work for IIS servers for Windows XP users. The
rest of the computing world will be blocked out of said websites.
Of course since users have no rights, it is perfectly legal to
do this but it is unlikely that Passport will become a viable
micropayment enforcement system when 30 percent of the users,
and 70 percent of the servers can not make use of it. Reason
number two is the sheer volume of competing information services
on the internet. As long as 16 year old fans can set up their
own sites about Sony MP3 Players or Britney Fucking Spears or
Accutron watches for free, no one is going to pay to use Corplands
services. To this end the large corporations have lobbied for
laws and restrictions that have bogged down the server scene,
it is considerably harder to run a server now than it was five
years ago, simply because of all the port blocking and bandwidth
caps imposed by the ISPs. But into the foreseeable future, I
find it unlikely that micropayments will get anywhere, not as
long as other people are permitted to do it better for free.
The only place where micropayments might conceivably see widespread
use is on DVD players. Most DVD players, along with the DVD format,
are already crippled with a lot of copyright protection and inbedded
firmware chips that , for example, prevent many DVD players from
passing through another device on their way to the TV and displaying
properly. It is actually within current DVD technology to charge
for use of a DVD through the cable connection. Of course such
a move would prevent users without cable connections from being
able to play DVDs, but as I said before, users have no rights.
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