am I the only one who avoids little $4/mo charges like the plague? They seem to easy to forget, and of course they never remind you - that your paying them ....
- Just my opinion -
Don't get me wrong, the subscription model is amazing; and a great way to build a business; good luck.
I wish there was a way that I'd get some credits from my ISP on my monthly bill, that I would then spend online super-easily, with whomever I wanted.
This is why the Minitel in France worked so well. Services collected usage fees directly from the carrier. It was painless for the end-user (except for having to pay the monthly phone bill). And service providers could make a lot of money if they provided useful online services. This was in the 80s...
Hi alain, Gabor from reMail here - yeah, I remember BTX in Germany which worked the same way. In 3.0, Apple will add in-app subscriptions which reMail might also use - they're simple and painless, and you can just click "no" if you want to use the service. Gabor
That's hilarious... I've never heard of the Minitel used in the contest of a success -- for the most part, it was an absolute and catastrophic failure.
Minitel was supposed to be what the Internet is today -- but we're not all using Minitels...
In terms of user adoption, it was a huge success. Probably even higher than the Internet today. Really computer-illiterate people managed to use it.
The number of services available was crazy. Most ads in the street would have a "URL", just like now with the web.
It also was an early example of how free can serve as the basis for a very profitable business model.
It succeeded in countries where the entire ecosystem was well thought out (and controlled, kind of like the iPhone app store). Just the terminal by itself, without the ecosystem, probably failed miserably in other countries, if they tried to export it.
It was a failure outside of France, a huge success inside. Half the country was using these dumb terminals (that were given away for free). I think framing it as 'the open and free internet won the fight against the state-controlled, for-pay, closed minitel', as sometimes happens, is one of those things that make a lot of sense in retrospect, but in its day the minitel was clearly a winner.
- Just my opinion -
Don't get me wrong, the subscription model is amazing; and a great way to build a business; good luck.