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From: justin@inmet.inmet.com
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: EFF and Prodigy
Message-ID: <272300001@inmet>
Date: 7 Jan 91 22:41:00 GMT
References: <180546@<1990Dec24>
Lines: 32
Nf-ID: #R:<1990Dec24:180546:inmet:272300001:000:1518
Nf-From: inmet.inmet.com!justin    Jan  7 17:41:00 1991


>I am not sure that Prodigy's management is uninterested in providing
>what their clients want.  I just think they want other clients.  :-)
>
>I've talked to Prodigy people and it's clear from the start that their
>goal was not to create a flat-rate Compuserve.
>
>They are looking for another market, a market that they believe is the
>big one down the road.
> ...
>Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473

Bingo. The important thing to remember here is that Prodigy was *not*
originally conceived of as a telecommunications product. Once they started
realizing the importance of telecomm, they added it in, but it was
a minor detail in the early days (back when the company was still called
Trintex, and still involved CBS).

Think back about ten years -- that's when this product was originally
dreamed up. The big buzzwords then were "teletext" and "videotex", and
that's the environment that Prodigy grew out of. It was intended to be
an information *provider*, not an information *communicator*. It's
never been important in the design, so it's never worked very well.
My suspicion is that they were taken *very* off-balance by the enormous
demand for the telecomm side of the system, and still haven't figured
out how to deal with it...

For what it was designed to do, Prodigy works fairly well -- that is,
everything *except* the bboards and the email. Hopefully, they'll wake
up and start dealing with the latter two correctly sometime soon...

				-- Justin du Coeur