Xref: utzoo comp.misc:11415 comp.org.eff.talk:1431 alt.censorship:1218 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!life!burley From: burley@geech.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley) Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.censorship Subject: Re: Prodigy Special Offer hits my mailbox... Message-ID: Date: 11 Feb 91 15:29:32 GMT References: <1991Feb6.141621.9765@javelin.es.com> <1991Feb11.061828.20234@looking.on.ca> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: Free Software Foundation 545 Tech Square Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-8568 Lines: 182 In-reply-to: brad@looking.on.ca's message of 11 Feb 91 06:18:28 GMT In article <1991Feb11.061828.20234@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: This is unfair to Prodigy. Compuserve charges more than $12.50 per hour for any usable baud rate (if you call 1200 or 2400 usable) and so a mail message that takes 2 minutes to write costs over 40 cents (compared to Prodigy's 25 cents after the first 30 messages) to write and also costs money to read, perhaps around 8 to 10 cents if you deal with it in under 30 seconds. Face it folks, 25 cents per e-mail message with 30 included in the price is actually a good deal when compared to past e-mail pricing trends. Some new trends, including GEnie's unlimited e-mail (but no mailing lists) for $4.95/month, are better deals, and many here are used to the unusual deal of usenet/internet mail, but I am a bit surprised at the bad press Prodigy's gotten on this price change. I used to have Prodigy and like it (limitations notwithstanding), but I canceled it because of the email fee fiasco. Here are some points that might help people understand the bad press they got: 1) They did everything they could to avoid letting people know about this new service charge on a supposedly (and advertised as such) "flat rate" system -- and I'm told they've received some stiff fines for this kind of stuff. For example, I didn't know anything about the impending email charges until somebody sent me email about it! Meanwhile, they were trying their best to lock in people to 6-mo/12-mo/24-mo deals by raising their monthly rates. The new rates, something like $13, a $4 increase, were perfectly reasonable, in my opinion; and if I hadn't gotten the email, I might well have taken the 24-mo option at, effectively, some $8-9 a month. And then been locked in, without necessarily knowing about it, to a $.25 fee for each email beyond 30 per month PER HOUSEHOLD (yes, children's and spouse's emails included in the count!). The information on the increase was there, of course, some 5 or more menu levels deep -- if you wanted "New EMAIL features" described, or whatever they called it. They never, to my knowledge, sent everyone email saying simply "starting in January 1991, here are new charges we're instituting for sending email". The term for their actions is "bait and switch", albeit on a different time scale than usually suggested by the term. Note that their TV ads, after I knew about the upcoming email surcharge, continued to state explicitly or implicitly that the service was "flat rate", as did glossy advertising stuff I continued to receive from them. 2) The reason they instituted email charges, they later explained (after getting lots of bad press for trying to hide the new charges), was because a "few people" were using huge distribution lists and sending lots of mail. This happened for two reasons: a) the distribution lists and quantity of mail went up hugely when the new rates were discovered, of course, which might explain why their explanation lagged the decision to increase; b) they censor ALL their bulletin boards, and to such an extent that getting something actually posted is something worthy of treating yourself to a night on the town -- they rarely explain why they did it, and when you get the email saying your post was rejected along with the original post, there is no way to edit it and repost. You gotta retype the whole thing. Because of this, groups of people who wanted to freely converse (not just in the "alt" newsfeed sense, but in the "talk" or "rec" sense, largely missing in Prodigy bulletin boards) simply found each other in the bulletin boards and put each other on ever-larger mailing lists. For example, if there was one discussion on computers, and another on music, you likely wouldn't succeed posting a bulletin talking about both discussions and how computers and music interrelate -- both censors would reject the entire post because some of the material was inapplicable to the discussion at hand. The upshot is that by censoring posts and not providing easy ways to communicate effectively with lots of people with whom you've already established contact and common interests, they forced most anyone who used Prodigy heavily to use mailing lists and email heavily. Needless to say, these people nearly live on Prodigy, and suddenly being told their activities were going to cost them in the neighborhood of $40-50 a month (for example) upset them when they'd committed so much time and made so many friends on this "flat-rate service". 3) $.25 per Prodigy email message is absurd. Each message is limited to four screens of 12 lines x 40 characters per line. No graphics. No ability to have text pulled in from a file (so forget about encoding graphics and such unless you are willing to type it all in). And, unlike USMail, since the recipients aren't necessarily going to be using the machine every day, delivery is actually less reliable. Further, unlike USMail, if you move (as in change services), your mail doesn't get forwarded to you -- for example, if you start using Internet a lot, Prodigy doesn't forward your mail to it or any other net. If you're going to charge for email at a price similar to the US Postal service, you'd better provide for email features roughly equivalent to USPS matter-mail features, and Prodigy ain't even close. Internet mail is far better, and I don't think it's worth even $.05 per send, despite the flaky time-of-delivery, the insecurity (Prodigy has, I think, inherently more secure email delivery, by the way), and the lack of ease-of-use offered by USPS (sort of) and Prodigy. Despite this, if Prodigy had been up front about the decision, and not nasty to people who complained about it, I would have stuck with the service, at least long enough to see if they changed the rates to a more reasonable, say, $.03 per email beyond 100 per household per month. If Prodigy had allowed inclusion of graphics, music, whatever, even if by simplying allowing significantly longer messages and input/output directly to your own system's files (so compressed MIDI files, for example, could be sent), I'd have been willing to pay $.08 per email beyond 100/house/month OR beyond 2K characters in length. 4) When people started complaining and sending email about the upcoming email charges, Prodigy responded in many cases by summarily canceling people's accounts. They've gotten into legal trouble over this, too, I've heard. 5) By raising monthly rates (ok), offering new long-term commitments at lower rates (ok too), and instituting email charges "in secret" (not ok, especially when combined with the previous two things), they showed what might happen in the future: Say you decide you don't care about email rates, because you and your family members don't send more than one message per day. But you like the online encyclopedia. You pay for a month at a time, then 6 months from now, at which point your kids are fairly dependent on the online encyclopedia, you get an offer -- "we're raising our monthly rates $2 per month, but commit for 12 months and you'll get the same low rate you're now getting" -- a reasonable one, and you sign up. A month later, you get a bill for $30 -- not including the monthly rate which you prepaid for 12 months. What's the $30 for? Well, seems they decided too many people were accessing the online encyclopedia, so they instituted a new charge -- $1 per access beyond the first 5 accesses per household. And, unbeknownst to you and your family, your kids ran up sizable charges by continuing to use the encyclopedia. So, you call Prodigy in a huff and ask why you weren't told about it. "Well, if you had looked under the menu item 'About Prodigy', selected menu item 'New Features', looked under 'New Graphics for Encyclopedia', and then selected 'Changes in Pricing', you'd have seen the info." You claim you didn't know to do this, and the response is "Did you look at the 'New' screen that keeps you informed as to what's going on? You should be doing that, and it had an item on these changes." You go look, and find an entry "Prodigy has improved its On-line Encyclopedia by adding more graphics in entries -- see 'About Prodigy' for more info" and realize you wouldn't have looked even if you'd seen that blurb. You then are told that the agreement you signed either had fine print mentioning the new service charge or didn't guarantee a flat rate throughout the term of the agreement. And that if you cancel, you might (or might not) be refunded for unused time, but not for encyclopedia accesses already made. Based on the email fiasco, I see no reason why Prodigy wouldn't be capable (and willing) to perpetrate the above scenario. Yes, the flat rate was great, and some of the features were decent, and, the main reason I liked it, it was EASY TO USE -- as a hacker, that isn't personally important, but as many of my friends and family are NOT hackers, and I didn't have the heart to expect them to use Compu$erve or others (which I know little about, honestly), that meant a lot to me. And my wife could use it without asking many questions (her experience with a little BASIC programming, using and making spreadsheets, and with some WP programs, helped, of course). And I have yet to get at all excited about trying Compu$erve. I have a problem paying connect-time rates on any system where I can't easily control speed of access (as a ~60-75 wpm typist and a fast reader of scrolling text, it's important to have a system that can keep up) and where they charge you MORE for using a higher baud rate! The relatives of mine who told me they were on Prodigy and convinced me to get it have stopped doing email on it, and have taken to using GEnie*Star, and I'm hoping to get some time to try it out -- but it's limited-time-access at the (more than affordable) flat rate. I really would have loved staying on Prodigy. It had its problems, but this email thing was much more than the final straw. It was the tree that fell and broke the camel's back! -- James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@ai.mit.edu