jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) (05/13/86)
The Usenet is an expensive proposition. However, it is not a charity
for all the companies that pay for it. For some, it represents quite
lucrative free advertising. This is not necessarily bad, as long as
those who benefit give something back.
Some of the net's biggest phone bills are paid by:
1) AT&T (well, they are their lines)
2) DEC
3) U.S. government sites
4) universities
Other minicomputer manufacturers (e.g. HP, NCR) and peripheral
manufacturers who sell a lot to minicomputer users (Tektronix) also
make major contributions. In short, until fairly recently companies
who benefited from the net had a lot to do with paying for it, though
some (DEC) put in more than they get out.
Some of the net's biggest corporate beneficiaries are the makers of
personal computers. One such company is one of the largest
corporations in the world. Another has seven newsgroups (10% of all
net traffic!) devoted to discussions of its products. A third has
five. These companies know who they are, and you know who they are.
All three are much bigger freeloaders that someone who mails the
sources to hack (I was amused to read one of the corporate
freeloaders flaming others for net abuse).
All make good products, and many people on the net want to read about
them. But two of the three have only leaf sites on the net, and pay
almost no phone bills and move no news. The third could certainly do
a lot more. A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show
that spending money on netnews is a good thing. It would be a lot
easier for people at those sites to justify the phone bills to
management than it would be for those who currently foot the bill.
I know that business for microcomputer makers is tough these days.
But what about the loss to your company when backbone sites are
forced to cut some of the lists that promote your product, because of
the load?
I doubt that this article will move anyone (except to flame me), but
if anyone is interested in moving more news as a result of this, I
suppose the backbone administrators could tell you what additional
connections would be most useful (I think we need another N. Calif-
S. Calif link, for one thing).
--
- Joe Buck {ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb}!epimass!jbuck
Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California
Better living through entropy!grr@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (George Robbins) (05/14/86)
In article <222@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes: > >Some of the net's biggest corporate beneficiaries are the makers of >personal computers. One such company is one of the largest >corporations in the world. Another has seven newsgroups (10% of all >net traffic!) devoted to discussions of its products. A third has >five. These companies know who they are, and you know who they are. >All three are much bigger freeloaders that someone who mails the >sources to hack (I was amused to read one of the corporate >freeloaders flaming others for net abuse). > >All make good products, and many people on the net want to read about >them. But two of the three have only leaf sites on the net, and pay >almost no phone bills and move no news. The third could certainly do >a lot more. A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show >that spending money on netnews is a good thing. It would be a lot >easier for people at those sites to justify the phone bills to >management than it would be for those who currently foot the bill. > >- Joe Buck {ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb}!epimass!jbuck > Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California I guess I'll have to assume that at least one of the net.parasites you are describing is Commodore and/or Commodore/Amiga. Your comments are interesting, but you seem to be making the assumption that Commodore is on the net primarily to promote and/or support our products. This *IS NOT* the case! The various Commdore/Amiga groups were created by Usenet Users who wanted to talk about Commodore/Amiga products, not by some kind of corporate agents. We also encourage Commodore/Amiga users to utilize the commercial networks to communicate with other users and support persons, although we haven't posted this lately. At last count, we support users on Compuserve, BIX, Quantum Link, and an Amiga Developers bulletin board. We *PAY* employees to sit at terminals and service these networks, while any usenet activity is strictly a personal affair of interested engineers. Further, Commodore (cbmvax, cbm) is not a leaf node - we have extensive mail links which are documented in the netmaps (where are you?) - and we distribute news to several local sites, with several more who will be welcome whenever they get around to installing news. There is no telephone money allocated to usenet and mail - we have to work things the way most other sites do. I've been on the carpet several times over the phone bills... So, please look elsewhere for net.bad-guys! Usenet is still user driven, and I hope it stays that way. Do you want IBM to subsidize net.micro.pc when, in a corporate sense, they don't even know it exists? Did I flame hplabs? You bet... If I ever make such a public mess of things, I expect my terminal to collect so many flames that it's shooting out Z-rays. So far, they've sent trashed news, munged headers, volumes of duplicated news and, latest, munged articles with good headers. Ignoring any wasted money involved, blowing spool files often results in lost mail and operational problems. The munged articles with good headers block the transmission/posting of the originals. My postings were intended mostly as informative warnings - scan your spool files for the real flames... -- George Robbins - now working with, uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|caip}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@seismo.css.GOV Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)
chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/15/86)
>Some of the net's biggest corporate beneficiaries are the makers of >personal computers. One such company is one of the largest >corporations in the world. Another has seven newsgroups (10% of all >net traffic!) devoted to discussions of its products. >All make good products, and many people on the net want to read about >them. But two of the three have only leaf sites on the net, and pay >almost no phone bills and move no news. The third could certainly do >a lot more. Well, as the official "get off of Apple's Back" representative to the world, let me point out a few things: o Apple has seven newsgroups: 1 Apple II and six Macintosh. Of those seven, the apple II group has been on the net longer than I have, which says something. one of the groups has had NO traffic (mod.mac.sources), one has had one item (mod.mac.binaries) one is strictly a gateway from the ARPAnet (mod.mac) one is obsolete and used to be the gateway from the ethernet and just hasn't gone away (mod.computers.macintosh) and two are used as general newsgroups (net.micro.mac and net.sources.mac). Of these, the number of groups that were created for Apple? none. The none of groups that are support by Apple personnel? none. The number of groups that were created by me? two (net.micro.mac and net.sources.mac). Does that mean that I should be a gateway since I am the person who caused those groups to be created? I have a MUCH greater role in them than Apple does. o Apple's presence on the net right now is exactly nil (due to news problems). When Apple IS getting out, the only person who does any kind of posting to the macintosh groups is Larry, who does it because he likes us. No official function, no official backing. o There has never been a piece of software posted to the net by Apple. They make their software available through commerical channels only. 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, and it is a crucial difference to make. The fact that there are so many Macintoshes out there is the reason for the popularity, just as the number of Unix(TM) machines out there gives the reason for the popularity of net.unix(TM)-wizards. If Apple dropped off the net today, what would happen to the Mac groups? Absolutely nothing. So why should Apple support it? contrary to Joe's comments, they DON'T benefit in any way, shape, or form. We, as users of their machines, do. >A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show >that spending money on netnews is a good thing. It would be a lot >easier for people at those sites to justify the phone bills to >management than it would be for those who currently foot the bill. 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. It is even more difficult to figure out exactly what the bennies are: how much is 'goodwill' worth? how much is 'good pr' and 'visibility' worth? How much is the enhanced recruiting and access to the technical pool worth? How much is the perk of making netnews worth? Good questions, no answers. When you break it down to dollars and pennies, it gets damn hard to quantify. 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. incompetent users, new users, too many users. Signal to noise ratios in the groups pegging the meter. Even if the phone bills were free, the problems would still remain. They would, in fact, get worse, since there would be no pressure to try to solve them. This makes as much sense as the idiots who think they can solve the problem by kicking Rich rosen off the net. It is misthink. 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
tim@ism780c.UUCP (05/15/86)
In article <222@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes: > >Some of the net's biggest corporate beneficiaries are the makers of >personal computers. One such company is one of the largest >corporations in the world. Another has seven newsgroups (10% of all ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >net traffic!) devoted to discussions of its products. A third has >five. These companies know who they are, and you know who they are. >All three are much bigger freeloaders that someone who mails the >sources to hack (I was amused to read one of the corporate >freeloaders flaming others for net abuse). > I think you have this backwards. The *company* does not have seven newsgroups. People on the net who use that companies computers have seven newsgroups. For example, if you read the Mac groups, you will find that Apple has almost nothing to do with them. There is one person at Apple who sometimes answers questions, but for the most part all the traffic is generated by people with no relationship to Apple other than being customers. I suspect that the situation for IBM is the same. I don't see how this can be called freeloading. -- Tim Smith sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim
jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) (05/16/86)
In article <3679@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: >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. > The fact that there are so many Macintoshes out there is the >reason for the popularity, just as the number of Unix(TM) machines out there >gives the reason for the popularity of net.unix(TM)-wizards. Almost every site on Usenet, and every backbone site, is a Unix machine. So net.unix-wizards benefits the sites that pay for it. >If Apple dropped off the net today, what would happen to the Mac groups? >Absolutely nothing. So why should Apple support it? contrary to Joe's >comments, they DON'T benefit in any way, shape, or form. We, as users of >their machines, do. On the contrary. The loss of the net groups would hurt Apple, as well as you, the users. >>A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show >>that spending money on netnews is a good thing. It would be a lot >>easier for people at those sites to justify the phone bills to >>management than it would be for those who currently foot the bill. > >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. >even more difficult to figure out exactly what the bennies are: how much is >'goodwill' worth? how much is 'good pr' and 'visibility' worth? How much is >the enhanced recruiting and access to the technical pool worth? How much is >the perk of making netnews worth? Good questions, no answers. When you >break it down to dollars and pennies, it gets damn hard to quantify. Advertising and marketing spend billions of dollars a year in this country. How much is advertising worth? Hard to quantify. For companies that build good products, exchanges of information on those products is very effective advertising. Even if people start pointing out some flaw, it's useful for the manufacturer to know that too. Why did Apple set up the University Consortium? How can you justify that? >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. Frankly, I doubt that Apple or Commodore or IBM will spend any more on the net. 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.*. -- - Joe Buck {ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb,csi}!epimass!jbuck Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California Better living through entropy!
chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/18/86)
> >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