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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Re: Re: Need for Stargate screening?
Message-ID: <2308@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Feb-85 00:53:36 EST
Article-I.D.: nsc.2308
Posted: Sat Feb  2 00:53:36 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Feb-85 15:04:14 EST
References: <494@vortex.UUCP> <702@cbosgd.UUCP> <831@hound.UUCP> <133@tmq.UUCP>
Reply-To: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: The Village
Lines: 54
Summary: 

In article <133@tmq.UUCP> peter@tmq.UUCP (Life gets very Weird) writes:
>Mr. Grantages seems to imply in his article that his access to USENET is
>paid for by his discretion to use his computer account to run readnews.  I
>would disagree.  USENET is actually paid for by organizations who donate
>their computer resources and telephone charges to forward news to other
>sites.  It is the administrators and managers at these sites that make
>USENET possible, and who will determine the future of USENET.
>
>If I had to pay for USENET, i.e., poll all the backbone sites via long
>distance, I could probably not justify to my management how having USENET
>benefitted my organization (in $$$). 

There are a number of things that can be used to help justify Usenet.
There is the simple fact that you have access to a lot of relatively cheap
consulting labor (ask Rob Kolstad what a REAL guru costs nowadays...) to
help you maintain your systems. A big win here at National has been
recruitment-- we've picked up a couple of really good people from our
contacts on the net, and we've been able to get a few others to actually
come to work for us because they viewed the net and our attitudes about it
as a strong perk (not the deciding factor, but a strong incentive).  We've
had a LOT better record of finding people to fill empty slots here, and
good people at that, through the net than through other recruitment efforts
(National, BTW, is looking for a few good hackers -- advertisement *grin*).
As far as I can tell it costs us less for Usenet recruiting than it does
for standard recruitment tactics such as newspaper ads (although we do that
as well) and get better results, mainly because Usenet targets very
closely the audience we are looking for. A third and less tangible effect
is PR-- people and sites who dedicate positive resources to the net become
known on the net, and it seems to improve both company and individual
reputations (which help recruiting, which ...). it CAN actually be broken
down to dollars and cents, if you want, although it is harder to do than 
other things. there are, of course limits, too...

>I do not think that the day is far off when backbone sites will not be able
>to afford to forward certain newsgroups (especially when one hears about
>layoffs, cutbacks and such at AT&T, which provides most of the backbone
>sites).

When I was at Usenix, I talked to someone at Dec who pointed out that
Decvax has gone over ~100K a MONTH in phone bills, and that it has become
impossible to do any development on that machine. They are going to be
switching decvax to a 750 dedicated to only mail and news and cutting back
on some of their connections to try to get things back under control. Their
phone bill for last year was over $1 million dollars. Think for a minute
what that means-- many companies entire R&D budget are less than that
figure, and we are talking about a phone bill. Please don't think that
Usenet is free...

chuq
-- 
From the ministry of silly talks:               Chuq Von Rospach
{allegra,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

Life, the Universe, and lots of other stuff  is a trademark of AT&T Bell Labs