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From: mcglk@bailey.cpac.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Info Needed on Prodigy Service
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Date: 10 Nov 90 20:57:18 GMT
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In article <14478@accuvax.nwu.edu> 0003209613@mcimail.com (Sandy
Kyrish) asks:

| I'm interested in knowing just how successful Prodigy *really* is.  [...]

| 1. Prodigy claims nearly 500,000 subscribers.  What's the turnover rate?  Do
| people "buy the yellow box", keep Prodigy for awhile, and then cut it off?
| And what is this 500K number really based on; boxes sold/given away, or
| active bill-paying subscribers?

Personally, I suspect that the number of *active* users numbers less
than a quarter of that.  Whoever's sending out Prodigy's mail tends
toward the redundant, to put it nicely.  I'm still receiving stuff
from them, after having cancelled several months ago.  Heck, they even
billed me for four months after I had cancelled (no, I didn't pay them
for those four months).  Duplicate that sort of behavior a few
thousand times, and you have oodles more people that are being charged
for your services.

| 2. Is anything besides the e-mail/BBS service really popular with
| subscribers?  Is the shopping at home/banking at home making a dent?

No idea.  The E-mail aspect wasn't terribly useful to me, but then, even after
about six scans of areas where I knew people, I hadn't seen a single person I
knew or wanted to contact.  Perhaps that's changed now, but ...

| 3.  What do you think people are really responding to with Prodigy -- the
| ability to access information, the ability to finally put their PC to good
| use, the e-mail/BBSs, or something else?

The advertisements.  On the television, it looks pretty good --
spiffy, colorful, whizbang, and fast.  In person:

| 4.  Do you/did you use it, and how do you/did you like it?

Yep, I did use it, for a few months.

The first thing that struck me was that it was sure awfully slow.
Configuration was easy enough, but the graphics were painfully slow,
and the characters flowed across the screen at a speed slightly better
than a 300bps modem (from a 2400bps connection).  The characters were
big, which meant that it filled up a screen faster than your average
80x24 screen, but I basically read along with the text as it was
printed, and then had to wait for it to accept my input and wait for
it to think about the next page.

The menus were poorly organized.  There was no way to get a simple
list of keywords downloaded.  Execution -- I can't stress this enough
 -- was really, really slow.  And with EVERY SINGLE SCREEN, it took up
some more time and space to barrage me with yet *another* advertisement.

When I heard that any public posting made on Prodigy was filtered by
the staff, that was just another point against it.

The only semi-useful thing I got out of it was trying to navigate EASY
SABRE to see if I could reserve an airline ticket.  Again, here, the
menus were poorly organized, frequently *almost* redundant (to wit,
two menus allowed you to see *exactly* the same information, except
for one little item -- I had to abort the reservation process and go
off to inspect the flight number again), and in general, barely
useful.

The vast majority of the board is an electronic advertisement.  The
usefulness of the news services was amazingly limited (I could have
gotten the same thing on television with much better graphics, more
detail, and at higher speed), the games were ... well, mediocre ...
and there was no way to just simply download a file.

I would have killed by the end of it to be able to dial in with
Kermit, and just see ASCII characters, but no ceegar.

USENET.  Can't touch that.

As I said, their billing department doesn't seem to be on its toes,
either.

| [Moderator's Note: I'm hearing some bad news about Prodigy lately. 

I heard the same thing from a different source that currently uses
Prodigy, if that helps.  :)  Still, it wouldn't surprise me -- Prodigy
seems to really like being in control.


Ken McGlothlen
mcglk@cpac.washington.edu
mcglk@cpac.bitnet