Digital Media Perspective 950126
January 26, 1995
Table of Contents
- Online Services: Are We Having Fun Yet?
- Motorola Takes the PDA High Ground
- Report from the Floor of CES
- I/O: Readers Respond
- Inside the February Issue of Digital Media: A Seybold Report
- Who We Are, Where to Reach Us
- How to Subscribe to DMP and Get Back Issues
Editorial: Online Services: Are We Having Fun Yet?
by Neil McManus
What will it take for online services and the Internet to be considered popular entertainment? This question was posed to me by a friend in the TV industry. There are probably hundreds of answers to this question -- and I'd love to hear yours -- but I'm guessing that people will think of online surfing as entertainment as soon as getting online becomes so effortless that it's longer akin to a chore.
"I really should learn how to get online," lamented another friend recently (in the same forlorn tone people use when they talk about balancing their checkbooks). She's not alone in her apprehension. In a recent Gallup poll, commissioned by MCI, 49 percent of the respondents categorized themselves as resistant to new technology. (An MCI press release about the poll labels these folks "cyberphobic.") In the survey, 35 percent of respondents said they fear technology because it forces them to continually learn new skills. In my opinion, these people aren't cyberphobic or technophobic. They just have better things to do than constantly figuring out how to get their computers to work right. To a lot of these folks, getting online sounds as much fun as constructing Lotus 1-2-3 macros.
Imagine that turning on a television took the same amount of work as going online. Instead of tapping the power and channel buttons on the TV remote like you do now, you would have to turn on the cable box; turn on the television; wait for your TV operating system to load up; open a communications program; configure the communications program to initialize the cable box; set the program to connect your TV to a local cable provider; type in a password; and, once connected, navigate to the TV program you want by poking through menus, clicking on icons and typing strange command sequences. If TV were that hard, people might venture outdoors more often. But, alas, TVs are easy to use -- at least until interactive television rolls out -- and people are spending hours a day with TV's entertainment.
Prodigy, America Online, CompuServe and the other commercial online services cannot expect an avalanche of subscribers until they become brainlessly easy to use. (Ease of use extends beyond how you hook up and navigate the service into how you budget for your monthly bill.) With its new picture-icon interface and relatively pain-free installation process, America Online was the easiest service to use in 1994, and I think that had a lot to do with its impressive surge in popularity. This year, the competitive stakes will rise once the Microsoft Network joins the fray. Look for subscribers to flock to whichever online services can make themselves push-button easy and make the cryptic Internet seem warm, fuzzy and fun.
Motorola Takes the PDA High Ground
by Mitch Ratcliffe
The Envoy and Marco, Motorola's personal communicators based on the General Magic and Newton operating systems, respectively, made their debut at Macworld San Francisco in January. The $995 devices are the first of these PDA breeds to include wireless network connections as standard features.
Sending and receiving information by radio is what General Magic's Magic Cap was designed to be all about, likewise Newton. Motorola's price point for its wireless communicators is about $300 lower than any competitor will be able to offer for the next year, on either platform. The reason? Motorola is literally giving away its wireless hardware (which communicates over Motorola's own ARDIS network as well as Radiomail) as a sort of loss leader to sell monthly connectivity to its wireless network. In exchange for subsidizing the cost of the radios in Envoy and Marco, Motorola will earn between $650 and $1,400 in network fees per customer.
That kind of cross-ownership of equipment and network resources hasn't been legal in the telephone industry for the past decade. But ours is a new, more competitive world, and Motorola is taking the PDA concept where it has needed to go since the words "personal digital assistant" first fell from the lips of former Apple CEO John Sculley.
Better than wired, at a price
How good are these next-generation devices? Well, they're better than the wired-network Newtons from Apple and Sharp and the Magic Link by Sony; that is, if you've the money and desire to pay for a fairly expensive wireless network. I used a Marco for a month before the introduction and found the ease of sending and receiving mail on the road a pleasant addition to the Newton environment. It would be overkill, though, for someone who rarely leaves the office -- better investments for untethered LAN connectivity are the Digital Ocean or ETE transceivers for Newton.
Marco is a Newton through and through, running a version of the current Newton OS that's available on the Apple devices. That means it's as clunky as it is convenient. (Who doesn't remember the disk-swapping dance that hobbled early PCs and Macs, and yet we continued to use them.) I was disappointed that the OS is still relatively slow, despite additional RAM.
Motorola's great contribution to the Newton OS is the ability to create a Name card for persons sending email to the device. The Apple Newtons force users to enter names and addresses manually, but Marco automates the process. This allowed us to set up an internal mailing list simply by converting all incoming mail to Name cards, rather than creating a card for each Digital Media staff member before a mailing.
As for the Envoy, with which we have had only a 20-minute session, the wireless connection adds a dimension to Magic Cap that is sorely absent from Sony's device. The ARDIS and Radiomail interfaces incorporate smoothly into the communications substructure of the Magic Cap environment, and sending or receiving mail is very much like the old wireline method, dumping all mail into the main In Box. I was a little stunned by the klutzy implementation of the outgoing-mail software, which always tries to send mail through the wireline modem, bringing up a dialog box that must be tapped before defaulting to the wireless modem. This should be handled transparently. Consumers should simply tap the Send button and have the device find the most convenient and inexpensive network connection.
A digital publishing platform?
As I've pointed out elsewhere, PDAs offer a very desirable market for publishers with time-sensitive and compact information that can be displayed on a small screen (see Digital Media, August 8, 1994, "Forgotten Market: Publishing for PDAs"). The wireless services in Envoy and Marco only magnify this opportunity, because they allow for delivery of data in seconds, regardless of location.
Also, as packet radio, cellular and PCS networks mature, it will be possible to use the networks' intrinsic ability to triangulate a device's location to deliver data about retail outlets, services and events in the area. For example, imagine that consumers subscribe to a service that delivers the scores of the local pro sports teams (that aren't on strike) to their PDAs. Rather than paying for this service, they might opt to receive short ads that subsidize the cost of delivery. (It will be important to allow the consumer to choose whether they get ads.) Businesses would be able to sign up to have their ads wrapped around data delivered to devices in their locality, i.e., "The Mariners are losing by two runs in the eighth inning. Turn right at the next light to receive a two-for-one dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken."
That, of course, is the long view, which is the only view that is relevant to the emerging market for PDAs.
Report from the Floor of CES
by Mitch Ratcliffe
Go to the Consumer Electronics Show to see reality. You'll have to work to strip away the hype, but the emphasis here is on what's shipping now and in the next 12 months -- not the interactive networks and services that dominate the general press. This year's gathering of retail chain buyers and their nerdy suppliers in Las Vegas was notable for three technologies, among others, that will be on the market this spring. (One buyer, a Bronx transplant to the Miami area who was riding in the airport shuttle with us, summed up the scene perfectly: "You can get anything in this town, for a price.")
Bob
Microsoft's "social interface" called Bob is a significant if not very surprising new direction for the desktop computing world. (It's not like Microsoft merely shipped a less network-savvy version of the General Magic operating system.) What Microsoft has always been good at doing is identifying these new directions, then marketing the heck out of them. Before computer sellers will crack the real consumer market -- the one that buys VCRs and "general audio" -- they know they have to come up with a friendly -- nay, inviting -- way to interact with these things. Bob is Microsoft's answer. Rather, it's Microsoft's first answer, as many more variations on Bob will follow.
Bob uses real-world metaphors, albeit garishly colored, to present applications and functions to the consumer. Want to write a letter? Click on the writing tablet lying on a desk, and so on. It's cute, and rather condescending. At $99, it's a strawberry ripple interface on a champagne budget.
Consumers also get to choose from an assortment of cloying assistants (a coffee-swilling dragon, for example) that provide a kind of autonomic personality for the interface. Microsoft makes much of the absence of user documentation for Bob, but these assistants are the embodiment of docs that never seem to go away, so that the Bob interface remains the exact opposite of the Macintosh's easy-to-use experience. According to Microsoft, the assistants will learn your habits and stay out of the way when you don't need help, but we saw no evidence of that in the demos. People we watched spent considerable time reading on-screen instructions. Microsoft also paid little attention to the amount of memory and storage one will need to run Bob, Windows and DOS (which you'll need to run non-Bob -- unBob? -- applications).
But Bob will do remarkably well. Microsoft has guessed correctly that the time has come for a kinder, gentler PC. With Windows 95 looking like a 96 model-year release, Bob will keep home folks interested in using Windows while waiting for the whizzy new model.
Sage
AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign started to look like "You Might" when it introduced the TV Information Center at CES. This settop box with a built-in modem turns the television into an interface to the telephone network. It is a smart first step toward all that interactive nonsense the company has touted in its much-criticized advertising. AT&T recognizes that the narrowband network is the place to begin bringing ordinary people into digital communications.
The first of a family of products based on technology known by the code name "Sage," the Information Center is a digital answering machine that collects voice mail messages that can be browsed by scrolling through a text menu of calls. AT&T will have trouble marketing this device to people who subscribe to telephone company-provided Call Center-type answering services, since those services can pick up calls while the line is busy and the Information Center can't.
Via its modem, the Information Center also provides access to text-based banking and to information services like sports scores and news based on the consumer's individual interests. Banking services will be rolled out regionally; New England's Shawmut Bank is the first to sign up to provide services via the Information Center.
The settop box will sell for $329 this summer. Service will cost less than $10 a month.
GPS
Pioneer demonstrated a new Global Positioning System navigation system for the automobile. Although this technology is priced beyond the consumer market today at $2,850, it is a clear sign that such services will be widespread by the end of the century. The system combines a GPS receiver, a color LCD display that mounts on the dashboard and a CD-ROM drive that stores local travel, shopping and entertainment information.
The key to the Pioneer system is the CD-ROM in which the company will package regional information. Eventually, the system will provide a monthly or quarterly update, on which Pioneer (or a third party) will sell space like newspapers do today. Consumers will drop the disc into the drive and, as they drive, view current information and driving directions on the LCD screen.
Pioneer can also build subscription services around the system. For example, the company could establish relationships with newspapers or yellow-page publishers that will package updated information about, say, restaurant menus, combined with special offers on meals. Ultimately, these kinds of revenue opportunities will drive down the price of GPS systems even if the cost of the technology remains high.
I/O: Readers Respond
In reply to Margie Wylie's article on the male-oriented tenor of cyberspace, we received:
From: Vinton G. Cerf - Vice President - MCI
I hope your readers will recognize that Usenet and Internet are not synonymous. There are thousands of groups, mailing lists and bulletin boards, maybe tens of thousands. Some are quite civil and, in my experience, not subject to the kind of rough-and-tumble common to many Usenet exchanges.
Personally, I would prefer to see a more civil environment emerge in the use of the Internet -- not to the exclusion of the existing groups, but to add to the choices. What many people who post may not realize is how differently their written material looks/sounds from the same thing offered in person and orally.
I see network communication as a funny blend of written and oral communication. It is more informal than most earlier written forms but not quite the same as oral forms. People seem to try to use it in the same way they might oral discourse, but, of course, it doesn't quite work out because of the lack of visual and audible cues.
Even though some parts of the community have had 25 years of experience with email and related methods, I think we are only just beginning to appreciate some of the dynamics of this form of communication.
-- Vint Cerf
Margie Wylie's reply:
While I agree that we'd all love to see more civil conduct emerge on the Internet, that will never come as a natural outgrowth of adding more visual or audio cues. After all, the patterns of interrupting and silencing that we've seen on the Internet are also phenomena of face-to-face communication between men and women today. (Anyone who hasn't experienced this firsthand should read linguist Deborah Tannen's _You Just Don't Understand_ or _Nine to Five_.)
The technology of the Internet is only part of the problem. The environment in which communication takes place favors male speech patterns (through protocol) and exaggerates the face-to-face differences (through a lack of other types of feedback). As a result, men and women can become even more polarized through electronic communication than in face-to-face conversation. The result seems to be that women just shut up and lurk. Worse yet, they do as they did when, as little girls, many decided "that icky science stuff" just wasn't interesting anyway. They say, "Who needs the grief?" and log off.
Well, the truth is that if women want to be producers of information, and not just consumers, we have to get on, get interested and speak up. More importantly, for what I think must be a majority of men out there on the Internet who see there is a problem, you have to stop accepting the prevailing norm with silent complicity. We need your help. You have to stop fooling yourselves into believing that women will be an equal part of cyberspace after it is made more palatable to our gentle sensibilities. It will be too late. Men and women of the Internet, get the Internetphobic women you know wired. And I don't just mean email. And speak out when you see discussion degrade into a struggle for domination.
We can't just wait and hope that the Internet will cure itself. I mean, how democratic would an electronic democracy be with over half the population being represented by a 15 percent slice (or even the 40 percent slice touted by America Online) of the online population? Not very democratic at all. Which brings me to the poor and the marginalized of both sexes. That's another article.
Inside the February Issue of Digital Media
Should we call it Internewt now? New Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has got the Internet itch. We take a look at how he and the Republican-controlled Congress may scratch it;
An editorial calling for Microsoft to shed its pesky anti-trust problems by breaking the company to three pieces: The OS/Applications group; the Microsoft Network; and the finance software group;
MUDs and MOOs aren't just for nerds anymore. These text-based virtual reality worlds attract thousands of users who spend hundreds of hours playing. Despite their lack of graphics, video or sound, MUDs and MOOs inspire loyalty in a very diverse group of players, including women, the market that many gaming companies have written off as unreachable. Today these Internet games are mostly free. But they just might be the biggest untapped market around for gamemakers;
Now that multimedia producers finally have ScriptX in their hot little hands, will they know what to do with it? The complex but nearly limitless authoring environment still needs tools that are easy to use before it can make a dent in the current market, much less become the standard;
A review of 2Market's CD-ROM and on-line service. This pioneering effort raises a shopping cart full of questions about how retailers can use multimedia and interactivity as effective sales and marketing tools;
The Good Stuff: A list of Things Digital Medians Should Know.
Digital Media: A Seybold Report, the monthly paper newsletter that sponsors Digital Media Perspective, brings its readers the most provocative analysis of the developing industry for interactive titles, smart networks and broadband applications. We turn an eclectic eye to the stories of the day to provide a more informed perspective with which readers can judge new technologies, new competitors and the assumptions driving the growth of the electronic economy. We question everything, and bring back the hard facts.
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Who We Are, Where to Reach Us
Digital Media Perspective is a twice-monthly electronic newsletter produced by Digital Media: A Seybold Report.
- Publisher: Jonathan Seybold
- Editor in Chief: Mitch Ratcliffe (godsdog@netcom.com)
- Editor: Neil McManus (neilm@netcom.com)
- Managing Editor: Margie Wylie (zeke@digmedia.com)
- Senior Editor: Stephan Somogyi (somogyi@digmedia.com)
- Editorial Assistant: Anthony Lazarus (lazarus@digmedia.com)
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