librarian@ADUS.ECN.UIOWA.EDU (ADUS librarian) (06/22/91)
For what it's worth.. I would like to add some anecdotal evidence to the discussion of the value of USENET... When a user calls me looking for some piece of code, I almost always get around to asking "Are you on the Internet- can you ftp?". I haven't kept formal statistics, but I believe the percentage who are is well below 50%. Many of these groups may never be hooked up (they have company policies which forbid it, etc.) Of those who are on the Internet, I haven't directly asked how many have set up a USENET connection and read comp.sys.apollo, but when I suggest I might research particular problems there, I often get a "comp.sys.apollo?; USENET?". The percentage of people who contact me who do not have direct access to comp.sys.apollo is probably considerably below 50%. These intuitions fit fairly well with an informal poll conducted at the sys-admin conference in Orlando, and reported in the May RING. It is probably unrealistic to think that any single medium (ADUS, USENET, your local sales office) can be the universal channel through which HP should reach users (maybe the telephone is one way). Many Apollo users may never be reachable through USENET (we have made comp.sys.apollo available on the UIowa node to anyone who has a modem). Many Apollo users may never get to go to conferences. Dave Shaw
dpassage@soda.berkeley.edu (David G. Paschich) (06/22/91)
In article <9106212044.AA11575@adus.ecn.uiowa.edu>, librarian@ADUS.ECN.UIOWA.EDU (ADUS librarian) writes: For what it's worth.. I would like to add some anecdotal evidence to the discussion of the value of USENET... When a user calls me looking for some piece of code, I almost always get around to asking "Are you on the Internet- can you ftp?". I haven't kept formal statistics, but I believe the percentage who are is well below 50%. Many of these groups may never be hooked up (they have company policies which forbid it, etc.) Of those who are on the Internet, I haven't directly asked how many have set up a USENET connection and read comp.sys.apollo, but when I suggest I might research particular problems there, I often get a "comp.sys.apollo?; USENET?". The percentage of people who contact me who do not have direct access to comp.sys.apollo is probably considerably below 50%. These intuitions fit fairly well with an informal poll conducted at the sys-admin conference in Orlando, and reported in the May RING. I think this may be a confusion of cause and effect. People with access to Usenet and ftp and other such tools would have less reason to call ADUS for help, or even to join ADUS. It is probably unrealistic to think that any single medium (ADUS, USENET, your local sales office) can be the universal channel through which HP should reach users (maybe the telephone is one way). Many Apollo users may never be reachable through USENET (we have made comp.sys.apollo available on the UIowa node to anyone who has a modem). Many Apollo users may never get to go to conferences. So by contacting people on BOTH channels, HP would read many, many more people than by contacting people on one channel alone. The Open Letter to HP came from one of those channels, namely Usenet. By refusing to deal with those people, HP made a serious mistake. If they'd responded on this newsgroup in an at all resonsible manner, even to say "the plans have not and will not change," they would have kept a lot more customers than they're going to after their response of "We're not going to talk about this here." -- David G. Paschich Open Computing Facility UC Berkeley dpassage@ocf.berkeley.edu "Can Spam increase sexual potency? `No!' say scientists!" -- Trygve Lode