George.Sinos@f666.n285.z1.fidonet.org (George Sinos) (11/15/90)
I just thought I would throw in two cents from a current Prodigy subscriber. The new software must be considerably better than the old, it can be used either with a mouse or with the keyboard. The menuing system is a bit on the tutorial side, but you must remember, Prodigy is not for the hard core BBS types. It is for the computer owner that can't really figure out how to use his computer or what he bought it for in the first place. Is it slow? Slower than I would like, but it works. Are there 500k users? That's hard to say. I, my wife, and my three kids that live at home each have individual IDs but pay one bill. Is this one or five users? Do they kick people off the system? Well, according to the incredibly long agreement that you must read and accept before you can officially log on they reserve the right to do that, to read your mail and return it to you for any reason they want, and you or they can terminate at any time for any reason. Personal experience: Slow but very good service. Why do we keep it? Because there is execellent educational material availble for my kids. They use it much more than my wife or I, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than buying games for my pc. Personal experience: On a Saturday morning a shower head in one of our bathrooms broke. Later that day, I was digging around on Prodigy and ran across Consumer Reports. My wife suggested I look up shower heads. The top rated shower head just happened to be sold by one of the Prodigy vendors. I switched to that vendor, ordered the shower head and it was in my house the following Tuesday night. On Sunday morning, however, I noticed that the same shower head was advertised nationally for two dollars off the price I had paid. When my bill arrived, it had been adjusted accordingly. I think that is good service. I think that is what Prodigy is supposed to be all about. I think email is a tacked on gee-gaw and not really meant to be the main thrust of Prodigy. Remember, the whole thing was started by IBM and Sears. These two companies put this whole thing together to gain a competitive advantage, not to provide a nice place for computer hobbyists to play. All the other services, are just there to keep you coming back so you can be exposed to the ads on the bottom of the screen. The closest analog I can think of is commercial television. We will continue to subscribe as long as it is useful to us. We will not even consider doing anything quite so rude as posting public messages insulting our host. (Don't you think you would be escorted out of Kmart if you stood in the middle of the store complaining about prices?) When we don't like it anymore we will just stop using it and cancel our agreement. George Sinos, Papillion, Nebraska. --- Ybbat (DRBBS) 8.9 v. 3.11 r.4 [1:285/666@fidonet] DRBBS Technical BBS, Omaha (1:285/666.0) --- Through FidoNet gateway node 1:16/390 George.Sinos@f666.n285.z1.fidonet.org