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Saturday, March 02, 2002 |
John Robb - "This year ~140 m computers will be sold. They will have on average a 1 Ghz processor and 40 Gb of disk. In contrast, there will only be ~4 m servers sold. It is easy to speculate that this year's PC shipments exceeded the combined power of the entire deployed centralized architecture of the Net by 5x." 
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John Robb - "I don't want to deal with the paper (it sucks -- I can't search it and it clutters up my home). I also don't want just the website. It isn't enough. It seems shallow. I want a full copy of the website on my desktop. Full searchable archives for all the issues I get while I am subscribed. A full list of all issues, by date that I can click on and explore. I want to take it on the road with me. Nothing less will do.
How much is that worth to the Economist? Say 300,000 feel like I do. They think the Economist is one of the essential resources of intellectual life. If the Economist charged $10 a month for that, I would subscribe. Value, with virtually no change (in fact a reduction in their site costs) in their architecture = $36 m a year. Enough for them to sit up and take notice? Yes. I bet they aren't making any money from their online site, probably even losing money. This alternative is almost pure profit." [OBSERVATION IDEA]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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