Yahoo! Now On France's Minitel System

RomulusNR writes: "Just posted to the Dead Media e-mail list this week, a story that Yahoo! is making a version of its site for the Minitel. Makes sense; take advantage of existing infrastructure instead of trying to reinvent and replace it. And after last week's story about the Gopher Manifesto, I wonder if we will see a Gopher version; after all the text-only, line-by-line interface is common to Gopher just as it is to WML devices and Minitel. And Minitel's older, isn't it?"

Comments

Minitel: a lesson for mail order retailers

[Submarine]

A few remarks to people ready to diss the Minitel system. The Minitel was designed so that it would

• be cheap, since the terminal and some services were provided for free;
• run even for users with a horrible home installation in some remote village;
• be resistant;
• have a simple business model;
• be usable by most people.

Sure, the technology behind should have been improved. Please note that PCs with 56k modems fit none of the above (although the condition of the phone line may not be relevant anymore, since people tend to have had balky in-house connections replaced and the POTS network is now very high quality). The fact is that today, many people, including categories traditionnally found to be allergic to new technologies, use it and use electronic commerce. Electronic commerce has existed in France for 15 years.

Now I pretend that there was a lesson to be taught from there. Thousands of companies started stuff on the Minitel (yeah, start-ups before it was hype to make Internet start-ups). Most of them went belly up. The successful mail-order retailers were those who:

• had a simple, costless Minitel site (0.37 FRF per minute at most);
• had warehouses and other systems so that they could deliver the wares quickly;
• offered reasonable prices.

boo.com fitted none of the above, and it's no wonder to me it has gone belly up.

Why the Minitel is still alive and well

[Thomas Miconi]

The timing for the Yahoo Minitel portal is perfect. France Telecom, owner of the Minitel system, has recently launched a huge advertising campaign for its computer-version of the Minitel : "iMinitel" (read "eemeeneetel"), a PC program that allows you to connect on the Minitel network.

The minitel system is antiquated. It's slow, text-mode (although ncurses-like "graphics" are commonly used) and much more expensive than the internet. So how could it survive ?

The answer is simple: "business model". So far, few internet companies have been able to develop a sustainable business model (ie something more profitable than "putting banner ads everywhere"). The Minitel system, on the other hand, is based on a pay-per-minute scheme. If you want to provide some service on Minitel (say, an access to some big legal database), you simply choose a pricing category (from the cheap 3614 to the $1/min 3617). When people connect to your service, they pay the price you chose to France Telecom, who keeps a part of it and gives you the rest. Ridiculous charges, maximal profit. A service provider's dream.

This is why many non-public national databases (such as Euridile, the national register of commerce) can only be accessed through the Minitel system. And this is also the reason why such a deprecated system as the minitel might survive for years, coexisting with the cheaper, faster, better Internet system.

Re:Why the Minitel is still alive and well... NOT

[anticypher]

Yes, minitel is dying, but slowly. There is still a large captive audience, slowly being eaten away by the internet. Internet access requires a rather expensive computer, while minitel requires just a free terminal given away by FT.

The new iMinitel service requires you to enter a valid credit card number, so all of your activity can be billed. There is a minimum charge of 50F/month, so you are enticed to use it.

The business model was a good one, back when the services could all be billed by the telco monopoly. With the exception of a few government services available exclusively through minitel, the only other businesses which thrived were the pr0n services.

And to correct some technical info posted below, the minitel system originally used V.23bis, an asymetric modulation system 75 baud up, 1200 baud down. The character set was a bizarre set of 7 bit characters, with numerous overlay character and graphics sets, and a whole bunch of control codes and sequences. It made translating to/from ascii or any other terminal program almost impossible. Many minitel server companies offered special delay modes to slow down delivery of characters to the screen, to ensure that a customer would stay online longer and increase revenues. This current iMinitel emulator also runs slowly, no matter how much internet bandwidth you have. The servers are still set up to deliver content slowly, in the name of revenue enhancement. Very frustrating.

the AC