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Mobilestar Less Mobile; Excite@Home Less Exciting
jc1 writes: "MobileStar, provider of 802.11b wireless LAN connectivity throughout 500 of the USA's Starbucks cafes, has laid off 88 of its staff, which a source described as "everybody". With the demise in August of Metricom's Ricochet service, one is left to wonder if there is a business to be made in providing public wireless Internet services." Or any broadband internet access at all - Excite@Home, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, has stopped taking any new orders.
I loved my cable modem. I had it for 3+ years, worked flawlessly, good upload speed, GREAT upload speed, all the stuff you know.
OK, now I live in an area that isn't wired yet, and Comcast's predictions as to when it will get here seem to be rolling out into the future.
Meanwhile, Comcast here in Maryland seems to be endlessly running ads for new people to sign up. I wonder what will happen there?
Meanwhile, being 30k+ feet from my CO means that I am anxiously awaiting the installation of my ISDN line, complete with per minute charges. Blech!
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
Having just set up a Windows 2000 box for a friend, I found myself needing to download and install dozens of separate commercial and shareware packages (such as Mozilla, WinZip, WinAmp, hardware drivers, PuTTY, and service packs).
Windows 2000 includes Internet Explorer 5, Windows Media Player, and lots of drivers. Windows XP, when it is released publicly in two weeks, will also include shell-level access to zip files (first seen in Windows ME), and even more driver support. Neither include SSH clients, but you have to be using a 2400 baud modem to be complaining about downloading PuTTY. It's one of the smallest, most useful utilities I've seen for Windows.
Every program I use in Windows 98 (Unreal Tournament, Quicken, e-mail, and a few others like CodeWarrior) works perfectly in XP. If an app isn't forward compatible, talk to their developers. Don't be so quick to blame Microsoft.
I live near Excite@Home HQ. I await the furniture auction; they had good furniture.
Restrictions:
fencepost
just a little off
Many businesses are now failing, not because of bad technology or bad business models, but because of poor execution. Startups are particularly beholden to their early investors, and all of the VCs were heavily pushing "land grab" business practices throughout the bubble. The reason is obvious: Stocks were valued primarily on audience, and if you want the best quick return on your investment, you demand practices that build audience share, period. Early investors don't care about long term prospects for a business, they just want a quick cash-out to flip into something else. The 1997 changes in post IPO-lockout (from two years to six months) only magnified the short term focus. Having structured the business with that bias, the result is inevitable.
Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons, many of which are completely out of control of the management or techs. Don't dismiss an idea just because somebody screwed the pooch in the past.
...-.-
You're completely right, but the deal MobileStar struck with Starbucks to get access to their stores was to install T1 lines in *every* facility they went into at their (MobileStar's) expense. This always seemed too generous to me. Starbucks wanted a corporate network; MobileStar wanted to use Starbucks to leverage a national deployment. The money just wasn't there, nor would the revenue ever meet the probably $200 million ticket for deployment. (They burned through about $100 million, I believe.)
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
You're comparing two utterly different business models.
A cable drop costs about a thousand bucks to install (with equipment), and you get $30 per month, every month, for years. Have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily dropping their broadband connection to go back to DSL or analog speeds? I sure haven't.
A corvette costs about $25,000 to produce and you only get to sell it once.
But, if your drops are crappy and your customers are stupid, you spend that $30 and more on repairs and handholding. And you've got the cable companies (known mother-rapers) as middlemen hocking you for a bigger piece and screwing up customer service even more out of spite. This was @home's problem. Excite's problem was that they believed their own hype and market cap and did some supremely stupid things insted of doing due diligence and trying to make a business.
$1300/mo for a T1 line is insanely overpriced (the phone companies are antediluvian retards). $30/mo for a cable line is insanely underpriced. $50/mo or so is the residential ballpark, $200/mo for businesses.
--Blair
I live in a brand new subdivision that basically has no hope of getting any kind of dsl/cable broadband any time soon (God bless Qwaste and the Deathstar).
Then a neighbor told me about a small isp (Mesa Networks) that was offering fixed 802.11b connections for residential service in my area with 1-mbps up/down for $58/month. I called them up, arranged an installation time for a week later and have been up and running with no problems for a few weeks now.
Since then, it occurred to me that small shops like these offering fixed wireless access are a perfect compromise between the bloated-beauracracy-from-hell providers (ie here, here and here) and the unreliable, unmanaged, unavailable you-get-what-you-pay-for communal neighborhood nets that have been spawned as a backlash. It's become obvious that turning a profit offering broadband where last mile wiring is involved is extremely difficult if not impossible. But, the infrastructure to manage fized wireless seems a lot more manageable from a small business perspective to me
Anyway, I don't have the time, inclination or expertise to professionally manage an isp network and I really hope that the model these guys are pursuing pays off - I think small local providers have a much better chance of tailoring solutions that can cost effectively meet the broadband needs of neighborhoods and communities.
I'm pretty sure the original poster was referring to the value of marketing to the economy, not its value to the company. Marketing has negative value to the economy because those who participate in it produce nothing of value - they merely try to persuade others to choose their employer's thing of value over somebody else's thing of value.
Theories that try to suggest that marketing has positive value to the economy appear to operate based on an assumption that nobody will by any of the things they need without marketing being there to tell them what they need. In other words, they assume people are too stupid to figure out what they need and then go buy it. Such theories are fundamentally unsupportable.
If marketing were not to exist at all, things of value would still be produced, at a lower price (due to the drop in overhead from marketing). What's more, those currently putting their efforts into marketing would be forced to gain employment producing things, so more would be produced, generating more tangible wealth for everybody.
Marketing is one of the known defects of a competitive market - the attempt to alter the supply and demand aspects of a product not by alteration of the price or quality, but by creating a perception of difference, and when one competitor does it, the others are forced to.