When all you can eat suddenly has a price tag:
I've been following the "Welcome to SI" thread with a fair amount of interest, lately. What I am finding somewhat intriguing, aside from the improvements that the SI staff have instituted, is how the membership is reacting to new fees being assessed for features that were once available free.
While some features arguably cost more to provide, it's a seller's market in many ways, and pricing may be defined by the feature benefits alone, or along with the level of user satisfaction that is attained instead of being based on the "apparent" cost-to-provide considerations, from the user's perspective.
(Of course, apparent costs are not necessarily true to actual costs, but users don't always appreciate or want to know this, even if the entire package has been re-written, yet yielding similar-appearing feature results.)
A message from about a week ago on that thread makes this point rather nicely: From: Message 20809291
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The following two features just became Premium-Plus:
1. The ability to batch-read messages in sizes other than 10 messages.
2. The ability to step through an individual's posts no matter what board the posts are on.
The second one, as it turns out, was working for everyone, including free members. That's no longer the case.
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Meanwhile, in the networking space we're beginning to see similar influences on pricing where quality of service and guaranteed speeds are concerned. Whereas, a shift took place starting at about the mid-Nineties from a model that was usage based to one that was "all you can eat," we now are seeing the latter model questioned, again, and in some cases turning back on its feet what had previously been turned on its head.
If we turn away from the SI pricing model I mentioned and address Internet access economics, instead, can improvements in speed and quality be instituted and sustained with a uniform, all you can eat, pricing scheme, or must there be a plan in place that nickels and dimes end users in order to get to a place where they can get what they want, if not what they need?
FAC |
