Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!harvard!caip!lll-crg!lll-lcc!pyramid!decwrl!sun!chuq From: chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Which companies pay for news? Which companies benefit? Message-ID: <3709@sun.uucp> Date: Sun, 18-May-86 16:33:58 EDT Article-I.D.: sun.3709 Posted: Sun May 18 16:33:58 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 20-May-86 07:18:19 EDT References: <222@epimass.UUCP> <3679@sun.uucp> <226@epimass.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Fictional Reality, uLtd Lines: 148 > >Joe Buck has made a basic mistake in his logical reasoning. These groups > >were not created for the benefit of Apple. These groups were created for > >the benefit of the people on the net who own Apple products. There is a > >large semantical different between the two... > > But there is little practical difference between the two. By providing > an expensive medium for Apple users to communicate and share software, > free, the backbone sites provide a huge subsidy to Apple. No! No! No! They don't subsidize Apple at ALL! The ONLY benefits are that the users of their products. Apple doesn't have a distribution setup on Usenet, they don't send out marketing material, software, updates, technical support or ANYTHING that could be considered a subsidy to Apple. I can't think of anyone who bought an Apple machine because of the macintosh groups on the net -- they just make better use of them. Apple would be no better or worse off than they are now if the mac groups didn't exist. The fact is that the benefits are not to the manufacturer, but to the user. Frankly, a lot of the traffic is somewhat critical about Apple, much of it rightly so. Apple doesn't post its software to the net, it also doesn't post press releases, marketing hype or financial reports to the net. If Apple were suporting the Mac part of the net, I'd expect a lot less information, a lot less criticism, and a lot more hype than we get now. Please tell me how this would be to our advantage? > On the contrary. The loss of the net groups would hurt Apple, as > well as you, the users. How would this hurt Apple? I don't see any way that usenet makes a significant difference pro OR con out there. It'd cripple some users, it would hinder others, and others (like me) would end up on compuserve full time. I can only see two ways the loss of the groups would hurt apple: o they lose a way of getting information to their users. analysis: they don't use the groups now! net loss: none. o they lose sales because net.micro.mac is gone. analysis: who in their right mind would buy a mac just because this group exists? the audience is overwhelmingly filled with people who have already bought the machine or are going to by the machine because it is a great machine. If you think killing the mac groups will impact apple sales, you're insane. > >>A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show > >>that spending money on netnews is a good thing. > > > >Wrong. I've DONE cost-benefit analysis reports for a couple of sites. It is > >amazing how hard it is to get numbers an accountant will accept. > > Try talking to marketing instead of finance. I only meant that it would > be LESS difficult to get the numbers to back you up when 10% of all traffic > concerns your products. I've done this for marketing groups. It doesn't help, since marketing has to decide on a dollar amount to give to finance. my analysis is that Usenet is a nice toy with some ethereal advantages, but I'd sure hate to have to justify it to management any more -- I did that for a while, back when it was smaller and less full of garbage, and even then it was difficult. Now I'd guess that it is almost impossible with two exceptions: recruiting and as am employee perk. when you consider usenet phone bills run at (take a small, conservative number from when I was running nfs) about $1200/month, and an average site has 5 to 10 users (another round number) you're talking about spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500/year per Usenet user to keep them happy. that's a pretty expensive perk -- for a person making about $40K a year (and assuming another $20K in other bennies) that's is about 2% of your cost for that employee. That's an expensive perk, folks. > Advertising and marketing spend billions of dollars a year in this > country. How much is advertising worth? Hard to quantify. Not at all. Manufacturers and advertisers know exactly what an ad will do for them. Market research is pretty close to an absolute science now. Of course, this has nothing to do with the subject. > For > companies that build good products, exchanges of information on those > products is very effective advertising. Agreed, but it can also be argued that putting these exchanges into a group supported BY a manufacturer causes a conflict of interest and lessesn the validity of the data. Because we don't need to worry about upsetting Daddy Warbucks, the information is more valid or at least perceived as such. > Even if people start > pointing out some flaw, it's useful for the manufacturer to know > that too. True, but Apple isn't looking at net.micro.mac for these problems, so how to they benefit from it here? Unless, of course, someone like me uploads it to Compuserve or Larry sends it to the official people at Apple? >Why did Apple set up the University Consortium? How can > you justify that? Because educational discounts for selling computers makes good sense. People who work with a computer in college are going to want to work with them in the 'real world'. What does this have to do with Usenet? Usenet doesn't sell computers, at discount or otherwise? > >Joe is making the basic misassumption that all we need to do is find a new > >deep pocket to pay phone bills and the nets problems go away. Wrong. The > >problem is not the phone bills, it is the cause of the phone bills. The net > >is screwed up. > > Where did I say that? Have you read any of my other postings? I was > suggesting that one of several companies might consider doing a little more > than they are currently doing, possibly supplying an extra north-south > link in California, to make a small dent in some of the current problems. > I would be happy to discuss with you what I think about some of the > other problems, but this article is already too long. You're suggesting that these manufactures put their resources (read money) into upgrading the backbone on the net because the current backbone is considering cutting back because of costs. That is called looking for a deep pocket in my eyes. > Frankly, I doubt that Apple or Commodore or IBM will spend any more > on the net. I don't think they should. we've got a philosophical disagreement on this, so I'm going to try to make this my last public posting, since it is doubtful we're going to convince each others. >But it seems the backbones are talking about downgrading > only the nontechnical groups; with the continued growth in the > sources groups, and several new types of computers about to get their > own groups, we're about to be buried in {net,mod}.sources.*. You're mis-reading things. The backbones are trying to find out which groups are least useful for the net at large, and trying to find some way to control costs while affecting the smallest proportion of the net possible. the Mac groups are large because the mac user population group is large. singling them out because of this is silly -- better to look for a group with a lot of volume and very few readers or demonstrable value. It can very easily be proven that more people get more demonstable use from net.micro.mac than the people punching it out in net.religion get from their group. Why, then should people try to keep around a useless group and kill off something useful in its place? chuq -- :From the lofty realms of Castle Plaid: Chuq Von Rospach chuq%plaid@sun.COM FidoNet: 125/84 CompuServe: 73317,635 {decwrl,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,pyramid,seismo,ucbvax}!sun!plaid!chuq The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do -- McCloctnik the Lucid