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Monday, August 19, 2002

 
11:00 AM: [#] [0]

one of the reasons i'm resisting .mac is that contrary to popular belief, $100/year is a lot of money, especially if you consider how much we have to spend on other software services that also want to charge you per year. for instance, subscribing to blogger pro for three of my four blogs will cost me ~$105/year. now add that to the .mac cost. then add any subscription fees i have for content sites per year, including traditional magazine subscriptions as well as video & audio sites. or even online banking fees & billpay fees. this doesn't include subscriptions for dialup ($240/year) or broadband ($480/year). or a domain name at $70/year, which i sometimes think would be neat to get. nor does it include the fact that many of these are introductory prices and will double next year or "soon," which means whenever the service decides to.

more importantly, unlike software utilities, which you pay for and then get to keep until you want to upgrade, you will pay for this stuff every year forever. software utilities have an incentive to improve so you'll pay for upgrades; software services don't have to do anything except threaten to cut off your access.

online software services pretend to be commodities, which means if you have a subscription to a paper, and decide to cancel it because it's too expensive, you can get another subscription to another paper and you won't have lost anything. services like hotmail want you to believe if you're using one web-based mail program, you can easily switch to another "brand" if you don't like hotmail, like you were deciding to buy another brand of orange juice. but these services are not that interchangeable. if you have to change your email address or domain name or blogger, that's a lot of work -- not only to inform people, but also to move everything to another provider. this is assuming you can move everything to another provider, since content is often locked into proprietary formats (how am i going to get all my blogger posts into another blogging mechanism? what about my comments?).

and so while i think price is a concern, i also think ownership is a major difference -- traditional subscriptions give you access to someone else's content, but this new trend affects your own content. it's a trust issue and i don't think we should yet trust companies enough to be responsible for our content, paid or not.

this doesn't mean i don't think things like blogs and idisk aren't worth paying for! i'm understanding of "the end of free" phenomenon. and i'm usually the poster child for social consumerism -- i don't mind paying a little more if it's the right thing to do. but i want three things before i start investing in online software services:

1. i don't want to be at the mercy of the service provider
i don't want the service to require me to use a particular platform or browser. i don't want them to have the "freedom" to change their terms at any time, without notice. i want them to create ways to transfer content between other services in a fairly painless way. i want opt-in rather than opt-out policies.

i think this should apply to free services, too: if they're willing to offer a service, then they're responsible for a certain level of customer service -- as opposed to one day deciding to wipe out sent-mail older than 30 days, shrugging their shoulders and saying, "hey, it's free. what do you want?" offering a free service does not clear them of all obligation.

2. i don't want overlap between services
one of the things that irks me is that almost everybody already has a built-in subscription cost -- your service provider, who usually offers you an email address, web space, and/or other offerings you may choose to get from somewhere else. but there's no opt-out, and there's no way to say, "thanks, but i'd actually like to get these services from one or more other providers, so could you knock $20/month off my bill?"

i'm not knocking isps, which i see as the most crucial element -- after all, i can't use an online software service without getting online first. but i think my frustration is in part derived from believing there's a growing segment of people who recognize they want "placeless" services (like mail, webspace, blogging, content) which don't change as they move around, but don't (nor shouldn't) have the technical ability to make it happen. and yet that's in direct conflict to isps, which are geographically locked into place and offer the same services. so i pay twice for the same things, even if they have different goals.

one way to handle this might be to aggregate services like cable channels, so that you could subscribe to one service to get several other services. in this sense, i think aol's structure really has an advantage: when someone signs up for aol, they often do get other services they would ordinarily need to pay for individually. this is also the way .mac looks like it wants to go with its foray into backup software. this idea, while having merits, makes me a little nervous because of rule 1: if i don't want to be at the mercy of individual services, how much worse would it be for a service aggregate to change its mind? plus, cable has notorious overlap and i still get a whole bunch of channels i don't want. better would be to offer a menu of potential services (and options within them, like several blogging clients) to choose from for each individual.

3. i want to pay less for each service
i know, this is the obvious one. $35-100/year for each service really adds up, and it's money that goes away every year. poof. given the limitations of the current setup, i see no choice but to continue to offer the free/fee structure -- but i'd like to think more people would be on the fee side if it were more reasonable to do so for simultaneous services. physical subscriptions to periodicals like discover and wired are between $12-$24, and it seems they have a much larger physical infrastructure to support. my guess is that someone will point out these are costs largely subsidized by advertisers, which have a miserable track record online. that's a whole other subject (though i believe marketing is still a viable online option even if advertising isn't). the point is that these are reasonable costs for the average household. i'd rather pay $100/year to support six or seven services instead of just one. if i can only afford to support just one service, how do i choose? which service is more "worthy"?

i admit to being a little insulted by the recent .mac strategy: it's an interesting idea, but i feel as if they're holding my content, my identity, hostage and i refuse to be blackmailed or bullied into paying. i'm also appalled that it's a feature which ties directly into the os, which means any new machine i buy won't really fully function unless i buy a .mac subscription. this is one of those instances where maintaining a free/fee structure would have saved a lot of ill-will.