Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!6sigma!blm
From: blm@6sigma.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Is USENET stagnating?
Message-ID: <313@6sigma.UUCP>
Date: 29 Oct 89 18:58:45 GMT
References: <40056@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: blm@6sigma.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Organization: Six Sigma CASE, Inc.
Lines: 35

In article <40056@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
|I want to find out why we aren't
|watching *major* changes, and why we aren't watching a lot of them.
|And what we can do about it.

Look at who makes up Usenet.  Seven or eight years ago when I first
started reading news on Usenet, a vast majority of the sites were
university and college computer science departments.  Today many of the
sites are companies.  This alone explains a lot of the Usenet
stagnation:

1.  Computer science departments tend to have more people with time to
work on things like Usenet.  Very often companies don't even have people
to install bug fixes to the software (witness Rick's recent version
findings), let alone take the time to design and develop new software
that is going to be given away.

2.  Many companies now rely on the news software internally.  At my
previous company we used B news and rn to communicate among our sites
in Seattle, Phoenix, Toronto, and Chicago.  This meant that any new
software installed had to be stable, and compatible with older versions,
as each site didn't always update at the same time.

In other words, Usenet has become a necessity when it used to be a luxury.
It was originally the domain of computer science students who could make
time to write and install new software, and if some of that new software
disrupted the network for a day or two it was no big deal.  Also, the
network was relatively small, so you could expect new software to be
installed everywhere in a week or two at most.  Today, any new software
will probably never be installed at some sites, and will take quite a while
to be installed at many others.

Doing something about this is left as an exercise for the reader :-)
-- 
Brian L. Matthews	blm@6sigma.UUCP