ndallen@contact.uucp (Nigel Allen) (11/27/90)
I haven't had the chance to use Prodigy (the company doesn't seem to
be interested in the Canadian market), but I thought people might want
to see Prodigy's attempts to defend its position on e-mail charges.
I found the following message on a hobbyist BBS. (I didn't actually
call California, but the message originated there.)
-------------
* Original message from Robert Stone
* Originally posted on HOTTIPS BBS, Glendale, Calif., (818) 248-3088
Thought you might find the following interesting, and laughable. This
was handed out at COMDEX to a friend of mine, with the words, "We
don't give this to everyone, just those who persist in asking about
E-mail." Oh, it was handed out by Prodigy at their booth.
11/9/90 handout at Comdex
Prodigy stationery
Prodigy
Interactive Personal Service
Prodigy Services Company
445 Hamilton Avenue
White Plains, NY 10601
FACTS ABOUT MESSAGING ON THE PRODIGY SERVICE
On September 6th Prodigy announced a repricing of personal messages
sent on the Prodigy Service, effective Jan 1, 1991. Here are some
facts about the new charges.
The Prodigy service was designed to give American families a broad
range of information, services, and transactions with unequaled ease
of use and low coast. Some of our most popular features are news and
stock quotes, home shopping and banking, airline ticketing, stock
trading and our new encyclopedia, movie guide and travel guide.
Hundreds of features are available -- including 30 free personal
messages a month -- for a single, low flat fee of $9.95 a month in an
annual subscription. Messages are delivered instantly anywhere in the
country and held for your family and friends when they're not at home.
Prodigy does not charge by the minute for any of these services and we
don't impose an access charge on any of our 500 local-call telephone
numbers nationwide. Our flat rate applies all the time without
restrictions to "off peak" hours.
We believe that remarkable value is unmatched by any media in America.
There are basically two reasons why we can offer so much for so
little.
First, subscription revenue from members is supplemented by the
commissions we earn when members buy things on the service.
(Advertising alone, doesn't cover our costs. It's member response to
that advertising that counts.) Every time you use the service to buy a
holiday gift, book an airline ticket, pay a bill, trade a stock, send
flowers or buy stamps, you are helping to assure the continuation of a
flat, unmetered fee.
Our unique distributed architecture accounts for the other part of the
flat-fee equation. Most Prodigy service features follow a "one-to
many" model. We send "data objects" from a central site to hundreds of
thousands of members' home computers, where they are processed. The
efficiencies of this process are reflected in our low, flat annual
subscription fee.
(more on reverse side)
But personal messaging follows a different "one-to-Prodigy-to-one"
model. Every message goes through costly leased telephone lines (often
across the country), and is stored in our large central computers.
Every time a member wants to read a message, it must be sent -- on
demand -- back out over the network. This is much more expensive than
the "one-to-many" model.
When we began to test market in a few cities, we didn't have much
live usage experience. We sized the network and set our flat-rate
price at levels that assumed a moderate amount of personal messaging
among families as part of a broad range of services.
Most families typically make a few dozen long distance telephone calls
a month. And that's the kind of messaging volume we expected. We were
right -- in almost all cases. Well over 90% of member households sent
fewer than 30 messages a month.
A small minority of members used the Prodigy Service as a high-volume
"E-mail" network -- something we didn't expect and certainly can't
afford to offer at current rates. In retrospect, we see that we were
giving people the ability to run up the cost of the Prodigy service
without limit. As we approached our national launch in September, we
found that 3% of members were sending nearly 90% of personal messages.
A very small group of members had even created special programs
capable of flooding the network with thousands of messages. Messaging
volume was growing 20% as month and costs were escalating rapidly. We
were spending more money to lease more lines, add more mainframe and
storage capacity and divert skilled professionals to support this
single feature among the hundreds available -- a feature being used
very heavily by only a small percentage of members.
With our launch nationwide on September 6th, we faced a business
decision. We could continue to allow a small group of heavy messagers
to keep pushing up the costs, and pass those costs on to the general
membership in ever-higher fees. Or we could ask those who received
the most value from heavy personal messaging to pay in proportion to
the value they receive. There was only one fair choice.
A flat 25-cent fee per personal message after 30 free per household
each month begins January 1 and will help us to recover some of the
many millions of dollars we spend to support this feature.
11/9/90
* message forwarded by Nigel Allen (ndallen@contact.uucp)trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (11/28/90)
(The PRODIGY response concerning unlimited email) >A small minority of members used the Prodigy Service as a high-volume >"E-mail" network -- something we didn't expect and certainly can't >afford to offer at current rates... >A very small group of members had even created special programs >capable of flooding the network with thousands of messages... >With our launch nationwide on September 6th, we faced a business >decision. We could continue to allow a small group of heavy messagers >to keep pushing up the costs, and pass those costs on to the general >membership in ever-higher fees. Or we could ask those who received >the most value from heavy personal messaging to pay in proportion to >the value they receive. There was only one fair choice. There was another choice; change the software so it cost less! The argument about storage and forwarding is bull, because Prodigy provides the equivalent of moderated newsgroups, a (one) -> (storage, once) -> (many) situation, and you don't hear them getting upset about that. What they seem to be upset about is that one person is sending email to many people, and their software is dutifully filing a copy in each person's mailbox, thus leading to inefficiency. Given that the vast majority of this traffic is in reaction to Prodigy's "editing" of newsgroup traffic, there seem to be two possible solutions: 1) Modify the email system so that it stores each message once, and each user who is a recipient of that message merely gets a pointer to it. This is a *minor* change. 2) Allow user owned/edited forums, accessable only by jumpword, and access restricted. Note that this accomplishes the same as 1) with even fewer software changes. IMHO, as an interested observer and non-Prodigy user, Prodigy is using this "Email costs us too much $" argument as a way to deal with a percieved (by them) loss of control over their product. They are also probably worried about legal issues (are they a common carrier, or an electronic publisher?). Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc. !uunet!biar!trebor trebor@biar.UUCP
dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com (David Tamkin) (11/29/90)
Prodigy management stated in the letter that Nigel Allen passed along in volume 10, issue 850: | With our launch nationwide on September 6th, we faced a business | decision. We could continue to allow a small group of heavy messagers | to keep pushing up the costs, and pass those costs on to the general | membership in ever-higher fees. Or we could ask those who received | the most value from heavy personal messaging to pay in proportion to | the value they receive. There was only one fair choice. But they chose both, didn't they? They're surcharging for (in their opinion) high volumes of email and also raising membership rates. David Tamkin Box 7002 Des Plaines IL 60018-7002 708 518 6769 312 693 0591 MCI Mail: 426-1818 GEnie: D.W.TAMKIN CIS: 73720,1570 dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com
ms6b+@andrew.cmu.edu (Marvin Sirbu) (12/03/90)
The Prodigy system is designed like a multi-level memory hierarchy. Information is stored initially at some nationwide location. As it is demanded in a particular city, it is copied to the city node and cached there. Thus subsequent reads do not require a transfer from the national headquarters to the regional node. (Cacheing is also done in the PC, but that is irrelevant to the point of this message) A bboard post, if widely read, will be copied from the national host to each regional, and then read from the regional many times. Thus, every transfer from the national to the regional is "amortized" over multiple reads. I infer from the information supplied by Prodigy that all individually addressed mail goes up to the national host and then down to the regional for delivery to the recipient. I also suspect for efficiency, the regionals are designed only to do object cacheing, independently of the type of object. If so, it would be a fairly radical change to reimplement mail so that mail objects with multiple destinations are not replicated at the national host, but in a two step process that would send one replica to each region where there are addressees, and the region would then replicate the object for each addressee. This would require the regionals to do more than object cacheing: they would have to examine the content of the object. If replication does happen at the national level, then, indeed, a multi-addressed message is much less efficient than a bboard post. Marvin Sirbu Carnegie Mellon