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@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home?
bofus writes: "This article from CNet points to AT&T taking over the @Home board as the nail in the coffin for @Home. It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there."
It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there.
In other words, he was actually good at it?
What really killed @Home was their portal!!
On every PC where at @Home software install was done, the home page was set up to a custom, VERY high-bandwidth portal site. It had daily movies, ridiculously sized graphics, and tons of customization. And no one ever used it fully!! It was difficult to navigate, and had an ugly interface.
So every time a person opened up their browser, poof, they were force-fed a ton of high-bandwidth info that they didn't want. Combine the delivery costs with the costs of maintaining that content, and you have millions of dollars down the drain. Those millions could have saved them in the long run, IMHO.
The problems are completely due to consumers. People got too greedy, got too used to fast connections and paying nothing. When prices were elevated to recover costs people wimped out.
That and idiots who like to complain about service being cut when they violate their TOS and run servers... idiots.
scott
IF you are just loading one Web site a day, there is no reason to need broadband.
.PDF files from scholarly journals for a research paper == 1 afternoon to find and download via broadband, 3 weeks to find and download via modem.
IF you spend any amount of time using the 'net, you need broadband.
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
Research: 100
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
It's no more correct to say that all consumers don't need broadband than it is to say that all true Americans are christians.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
On the plus side, this article has some thorough reporting. Which is a nice departure from the press-release driven slop CNET usually dishes: "AMD announced its high end end processor will jump from 2.3 to 2.4 GHz."
On the down side, there's no attempt at analysis. All we know is Eslambolchi might have donated HIV infected blood to a terribly wounded company. In the short term, @Home clearly benefited from his expertise. But his tenure might have destroyed the company.
This was a good article because it raised some important questions. A great article would have provided answers.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Broadband changes the way people use the net, lacking a killer app was not what killed @Home or broadband in general. The ability to just open a browser and be on the web is a killer app in itself. Dial-up is and always has been a fucking hassle, v.92 would have gone a ways to alliviating that hassle but it's implimentation is virtually nil. There wasn't a broadband revolution anyways, that is just a flawed argument. Like most everything else broadband internet access is just a technological progression whose hype level rises and falls according to economic figures. PCs didn't appear in everyone's homes overnight, it took several years for it to happen. Same with internet access and now broadband internet access. I hate flash animations and trying to watch streaming video, my cable modem saves me time downloading the stuff my modem used to choke on. Downloading 300 newsgroup headers or 200 e-mails over a 28.8 is a bitch no matter how patient you are.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Why would your average person spend hours in front of a computer screen trying to navigate some byzantine e-commerce site, when they could call up a couple friends and go down to the local shopping center?
.PDF format. 100 papers on cranial morphology at 8-25MB each is 800MB to 2GB of .PDF files. If you can show me where to find papers from, say, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology just by searching Google... Please let me know so that I can save $$$$! Of course, even then, I'd still have to download all those pesky .PDF files...
Um, because my budget for christmas shopping isn't $2000, it's more like $200 -- i.e. Amazon.com, not Macy's.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day.
If you're involved in academics or publishing in any way, *everything* is done via e-mail. You get papers, chapters, invoices, complaints, and everything else via e-mail. Busy people use e-mail. If you don't use a lot of e-mail, you must not have to deal with very many busy people. I've got friends in corporate america (no, not technology) who get twice as much e-mail as me. They e-mail at their desk, on their cell phone, on their blackberry, in their living room, and in their bathroom on their Palm, and they're not even in technology.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two
You certainly can't get most academic journals at a library, even a university library usually only carries a small subset of them. You certainly won't find any articles from such journals on the net through Google. The only way to get scientific research (no, not the NBC article on the research, the actual research) is to either pay for the journal ($$$$$$$) or pay for a membership to an online database which carries the journal (only $$$$)... But even with the membership, the papers are provided in
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
What exactly makes you average over me? I have two little sisters (out of a total of four) still living with my parents. These two (with their friends) download at least 2-4 game demos a month and play them all the way through, I understand. I don't game very much but they apparently do, and they're girls, 13 and 16 with N'Sync and Dragonball Z posters on their walls. I didn't teach them where to get game demos, I don't even know! Of course, I do download Linux...
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority.
Woah. As I said, I depend on the Internet to: 1) save me money when I shop, 2) talk to bosses and colleagues via e-mail, 3) get academic research or other content-rich information (not just Google-searching) and 4) get free software whenever I can. Same as everyone else in the college world and many people in the non-college world.
Ever think maybe you're a little behind the curve of what "average" is?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
And let's not forget the idiotic action of their bondholders at the 11th hour, when they felt AT&T was not offering enough money for @Home's assets. "Let's call their bluff!" the bondholders said. "They're not gonna switch over if they can get @Home for less than it would cost to switch over, even if they have to pay more than they'd like to!"
Only, whoops, AT&T wasn't bluffing! "Sorry, guys, we've got our own network; we don't need you anymore. Have fun in bankruptcy court." And everyone else soon followed suit. I bet that three hundred million AT&T was offering would look mighty good to those bondholders about now . . .
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org