Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 9 March 2001, 4:45 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Wednesday
07/03/2001
Today's buzz word: monetize. No, not a soft drink to accompany the Royal Academy's Cezannewichs, but the magic spell to stop your dotcom from becoming dotgone. It means -- and take this slowly, as it's a major breakthrough in new economy thinking -- to charge people for services instead of giving them away. (How much would you pay for this diary, eh? No, don't answer that, I couldn't bear the shame).
Microsoft, unusually, is at the leading edge of this thinking. And so it's experimenting with a paid-for version of MSN that comes with a music subscription, phone services, spam filtering and advanced scheduling of downloads. Stuff like that.
Which is all very well... except that unless I miss my guess, I can get all those for free without going near MSN. In fact, I do get all those for free. And I don't go anywhere near MSN. I tried, once upon a time, when MSN was a charged-for service, but could never get it to work. I wonder if they've fixed that yet?
So the problem is -- unless everyone does it, the ones who stay free will garner huge numbers of hits, probably enough to survive on the old models. Interesting problem, eh?
07/03/2001
Today's buzz word: monetize. No, not a soft drink to accompany the Royal Academy's Cezannewichs, but the magic spell to stop your dotcom from becoming dotgone. It means -- and take this slowly, as it's a major breakthrough in new economy thinking -- to charge people for services instead of giving them away. (How much would you pay for this diary, eh? No, don't answer that, I couldn't bear the shame).
Microsoft, unusually, is at the leading edge of this thinking. And so it's experimenting with a paid-for version of MSN that comes with a music subscription, phone services, spam filtering and advanced scheduling of downloads. Stuff like that.
Which is all very well... except that unless I miss my guess, I can get all those for free without going near MSN. In fact, I do get all those for free. And I don't go anywhere near MSN. I tried, once upon a time, when MSN was a charged-for service, but could never get it to work. I wonder if they've fixed that yet?
So the problem is -- unless everyone does it, the ones who stay free will garner huge numbers of hits, probably enough to survive on the old models. Interesting problem, eh?
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