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Web Access on Handhelds
An anonymous reader sent in: "According to The Register, AvantGo is shutting down unregistered (unpaid) "custom channels" with more than eight subscribers. Until now, AvantGo has been free (as in beer). What alternatives are there for Web sites that wish to distribute free information to PalmOS devices? Blazer and Eudora Internet Suite require wireless connections; Plucker is open-source and almost does the trick but doesn't automatically synchronize and the installation is way too complicated for the average user. Is there an alternative to paying AvantGo thousands of dollars? All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it."
In the state of the internet with advertising revenue down substantially, where are many of the sites that are struggling to survive themselves going to come up with these funds?
I work at a newspaper and we've just recently scrapped the whole Avantgo feed idea because they want to charge content producers to deliver their feed.
Everyone knows that nothing is free and someone should pay for this, it should hardly be Avantgo but it's too much with too little work.
IMO a successful model would be for Avantgo to do some of the legwork and go out there and promote themselves instead of relying on all the content producers to fill the trough. It's a double burden because first you have to pay for a service and then you have to find some way to get substantial traffic numbers there so perhaps ads can pay for it.
I think Avantgo even though they do a lot of corporate business is going to lose a lot of the people who thought it was a cool service. Avantgo should be charging the people who download and give a percentage to the content producer. It's a win win situation that way. This is the way the internet is moving, why not try to embrance and not abandon?
AvantGo does 2 things: transcodes content to fit the abysmally bad PDA screens (both pocket PC and Palm screens suck for web content display), and cache the content so you have it when you're walking around away from your cradle (which is where your desktop or laptop probably is located anyway). Can we all agree that sooner or later both of these problems will be resolved by improvements in technology and delivery? ;-). Avantgo is not a solution, but a technical bandaid with a widow-of-life based on how long it takes these problems to be fixed at the source.
As others here have noted wireless connections will make the second need go away. Better PDAs and a solution to the screen issue will make the first unecessary.
Neither of these needs are going away this week, but perhaps those at Avantgo see their product for what it is and are preparing to give up
Let's hope those that can will address the real problems.
I say this loving Avantgo: it does what it does amazingly well. Things would just be so much easier if it didn't need to be there, and it doesn't.
Has there been a single one yet which hasn't created an enormous gulf between the lowest price point and free which just doesn't seem worth crossing?
I mean, 9 users, and it's 1000 bucks a year? I thought the article said they were worried about BIG businesses using them.
Every time a free service starts charging, it seems, they charge way too much for way too little, often while still leaving the free services there, which sometimes are good enough anyway. (Yahoo mail, for example)
Is there an example of a service which charges small increments in price for small increments in service?
Software companies when they move from 'give it away for free just to get users' to 'I must make money now' often take a poor approach to the problem of transition.
Ask yourself who is getting value from using Avantgo - the obvious answer is both consumers and providers of content to varying degrees. But as far as Avantgo is concerned they need to go after the ones that are willing to pay, be it either. It looks likes they have gone after the providers because they probably have invested more in the relationship with Avantgo and are more likely to be willing and able to pay for prices Avantgo will need to charge to make it worth their doing it. Avantgo like many software companies probably does not have the infrastructure to charge micropayments that might make sense to consumers of content.
The problem with going after providers is that they come into several groups some that have money and will pay and some that do not or will not pay because the value Avantgo offers them is simply not worth the money that Avantgo is asking.
One group is the non commercial customers - they don't make money out of whatever service they offer to consumers but they do increase the value of Avantgo to the consumers in general. These are the people that suffer with Avantgo's new model and it looks like the original poster is one of these. Now if Avantgo could identify these people as non commercial users and license them to use Avantgo as long as they stay non commercial then they would keep such users recognising that there is no money in that relationship at the moment and keeping the increased value of having them part of the Avantgo network. A very good example of the implementation of such a model would be Cincom's Non Commercial Smalltalk license.
Another option would have been to migrate all their non paying providers over to a consumer payment service whereby the consumer pays a small monthly amount for unlimited access to the non paying providers and gets paying providers for free. In fact everyone would get the fee paying providers for free. this way Avantgo would have gained a consumer service they could charge for and a free consumer service for the providers that it make sense to do that.
But I am sure that they thought long and hard about the right way to change their charging model - it is absolutely critical for any business and getting it wrong can have catastrophic effects on a business. They seem to have opted for a simple to implement and straight forward model that is likely to generate more money in the short term (from the providers who do feel the need to pay the $1000 to continue this service) rather than one that will build their network over time and add value to the network. They are clearly willing to risk losing many valuable providers (who add value in terms of the breadth of their 'channels') because they do not bring money to Avantgo's bottom line. I suspect they implemented this change too late in their business and when the need for money was to strong. But it may just be that they did not realise they had other alternatives and if so maybe they will react to this /. discussion.