Slashdot Mirror
How Long Can The Free Services Stay Free?
A nameless cretin writes: "Yahoo and
Bigfoot
are both noted for providing free services.
They both seem to be planning to add fees for selected services.
Yahoo's "Yahoo! by Phone" service,
also known as "1-800-MY-YAHOO",
provides various information services via voice phone, including the
ability to retrieve e-mail. According to
this page
they are planning to charge a monthly subscription fee beginning
May 7, 2001.
Bigfoot provides a variety of e-mail services, such as relaying and
filtering. They do not provide mail boxes. Although some of their
pages
still indicate their services are free, some member pages
(requiring member login) indicate a $19.99 annual subscription fee will
be required for many of their services.
Although I am disappointed in these changes, I would like to thank them
for the service they have provided us. I hope they are able strengthen
themselves financially and continue to exist. I also hope they explore
new means of providing free service." Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down or leaning suspiciously of late? It's been rather nice to have so many free email accounts in the meantime, eh?
It's pretty obvious what's wrong with the ads on the net, isn't it? A site that isn't making any money has ads on it to cover some expenses, the ads are banners for other sites that are also not making any money and so the circle is complete.
The money initially pumped into these companies is running out, so there is no one left to pay for the banners.
The Internet needs big companies to realize that it's a great place to advertise! We need Coca Cola ads, shampoo banners and all the crap we're used to from watching TV. Those are the ads that actually bring some real value to the advertisers as they need their trademark to be displayed everywhere you go.
It is time for the Internet to grow up. It's not going to be pretty, but it has to.
I am a former employee of a "dot-com", company which was closed by its parent company, so this is somewhat dear to me. And painful.
The company I worked for gave away its product for free to home users while pursuing "branding" (OEM) deals with other companies for increased eyeball count andhopefullysome revenue.
It didn't work.
While I will be the first to admit the banner emplacement in our product was poorly-implemented (one of the ways we intended to generate revenue), the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of people do not wish to pay for products or services, and if threatened with this, will move to another product or service. And as for deals with other companies, well, most of them were in the same situation.
The minority of the user base who are willing to pay for the product or service are usually not large enough to sustain the company. And OEM deals with companies with the same problem does not help, either. Instead, your own costs increase to support the new users you've just gained. And when money starts getting tight, one of the first things which gets cutor at least frozenis the support budget.
I've had plenty of time to ponder what went wrong (e.g., I still haven't found employment), and have come up with the following list of pitfalls we didn't avoid:
Do not lie to, mislead, or hide information from your customers. If you intend to turn a free product or service into a commercial one, let them know right up front that one day that might occur.
Your customers are your reality check. Not any sycophants you might be surrounded with, boards of directors, or venture capitalists. Listen to your customers. Within reason, do what they tell you. It could be that one suggestion, with a little polishing, might be just the thing to monetize your product or service.
As a corollary, I'm aghast at the number of companies which need to outsource market research/customer feedback activities. Why can't you ask your customers directly, or, for that matter, the folks who interact daily with them, the customer service reps, technical support engineers, account managers, and so forth? Are you afraid you are going to hear lies if you ask your customers or employees, and that the feedback you get is only valid if it is "massaged" though a third party? Blah.
Human beings are social animals, and need to interact with other people. No amount of videoconferencing, conference calls, email, or instant messaging is going to change that. And allowing employees to remain faceless and anonymous to each other is a great way to install fear and loathing in each other.
If you've outgrown your building and need to move activities into different offices that's fine; it means you're probably doing something right. However, don't put them in different cities, or, God-forbid, different states.
Before you start laughing like a hyena, keep in mind the same is true for developers. If your developers have to have new computers every few months, chances are you're going to be shipping products that are unusuable by most of your customers. If you give two groups of developers identical specs, and one group has the latest Pentium III/IV/whatever systems with hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 21" monitors, and a network spewing Cerenkov radiation, and the other group has 486 and Pentium systems stuffed with a few 10's of megabytes of RAM, monitors that can actually be carried by one person, and a network that just might be as fast as sneaker-net, well, you're going to get two very different-looking products that do the same thing. Which do you think your customers would rather use? The software that forces them to do massive infrastructure upgrades, or the one that blasts along with the occasional sonic boom? I know which one I'd rather use.
So, in a nutshell, if you respect and listen to your customers and your employees, develop products that people are willing to pay for, and spend your money wisely, you'll probablyand there's a fairly big "if-factor" in there do okay.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
- - -
Dexter is a good dog.
The only reason a company offers something for free is to raise their profile so that they can sell some profitable services, whether it's eyeball-time (ads) or other services.
Sometimes it happens that their initial business plan fails because a smaller percentage of the public opted for the "pay" services than the company in question expected. It's certainly fair play to add new "pay" features, and it's even fair play for a company to turn some of its "free" services into "pay" services as long as appropriate notice is given.
I honestly don't expect my Bigfoot account to be around forever, nor my Hotmail account... They don't owe me anything in that regard, except for common courtesy. Problem is that we tend to get wrapped up into a sense of entitlement once we get habituated to something...
Of course, that's just MY opinion, and I'm often wrong. (Just as my ex-girlfriends...)
No, Internet ads ARE effective. To say that they're ineffective as compared to TV/Radio/Print is comparing apples and oranges. With Net ads, people are trying to track direct clickthroughs. There's virtually no consideration given to mindshare or branding. With TV/Radio/Print, it's ALL about mindshare and branding. There is NO clickthrough to measure. People buy those ads, and look at their sales, and see if they're going up after an ad campaign. Ad companies need to start to think the same way for the Net. Just because somebody doesn't click on an ad (I don't click on any TV ads) doesn't mean that they're not effective. Hell, or you can think the other way, and say that there is no direct way to measure traditional advertising at all (other than 'Tell us where you saw our ad when you come in to our store!'), so it's TV/Radio/Print advertising that's totally ineffective.
After reading a lot about RedHat and Linux, yesterday I decided that I
wanted to try it out. But I live in a small town and our only computer
shop sells only Microsoft Windows and a few games. In order to find
out where I could buy RedHat Linux, I talked to some of the "hacker"
type of guys at my job, who knew more about it. I was infuriated when
I found out that it was possible to download and even install RedHat
Linux from the Internet for free, through illegal so called "FTP
mirror" servers! They even told me that this was the "normal" way of
installing RedHat Linux. Even though it is illegal to download
software from the Internet like this!
Personally, I think this kind of behavior is abhorrent! You people
just don't understand that theft is theft, even though you are only
stealing "bits of information". The people behind Linux deserves to be
paid for their hard work! How would you feel if somebody stole your
computer? That wouldn't be too fun, would it?
Why do you think Bill Gates of Microsoft (the creator of MS-DOS and
Windows) has become a wealthy man, when Linus Torvalds of RedHat (the
creator of Linux) hasn't? That's because people have been paying Mr
Gates for his software, while other people are illegally downloading
Mr Torvalds' RedHat Linux for free!
From what I've heard, there are even web sites that specializes in
providing stolen Linux software (i.e., programs that can be run under
the Linux operating system). At those sites, you can choose what
kind of software you want to download (games, word processors, etc.),
and you are provided with lists of stolen software that you can
download, for free!
Even though there must be millions of dollars lost because of this
murky business, this hasn't been brought into the general public's
attention. My guess is that this is due to the fact that everyone has
been talking about the Napter MP3 web site. But I hope that this "free
software" business will be the next in line to be shut down!
-- Harold