Unless European internet environment has been changed by now,
until last year it used to be really expensive to be online from
Europe.
What do you mean, expensive for users to access the Internet,
or expensive for companies to put a server on-line?
For users, the price has been varied, depending on where they
live. There is (so far) no flat rate for unlimited local calls
like some cities in the U.S. - you have to pay for every minute
of dial-up access. If AOL, or CIS, or your Internet access
provider has a number in the local area, you can surf the net for
many hours per month without going bankrupt, but you still want
to make good use of your connect time and not leave the system
idling. Most services break the connection automatically after 15
minutes if there is no input, and the rate at which nodes are
being added has increased dramatically, the number of users
apparently having reached critical mass.
The rates for all calls, local and long-distance, were about 3x
higher than in the U.S. 10 years ago, but have been slowly coming
into line and are now comparable. As of now (1/1/98) the
telecom market has been deregulated in Europe, even more so than
in the U.S. so I expect even more price drops. At the moment,
there are still big discrepancies in some specialized segments.
The cellular phone monthly fee in Switzerland (SwissCom) for
roaming (using the phone in neighboring countries) is about 10x
higher than in Finnland, for example. This will have to change
very soon.
I don't see any customers getting entire products via download
anywhere any time soon considering the size of the development
tools and the documentation. Who wants to download a whole
CD-ROM's worth of stuff? And you'd be guaranteed to go crazy
trying. Many times I try to get a 14 MB file via FTP only to
see the connection stall at 13 MB due to traffic overload on
the Internet, and then see the communications software abort the
transfer on a time-out. The protocols are so primitive that you
can't restart where you left off. You'd think Netscape would
have addressed this by now, but they haven't. I've got ISDN
by the way - doesn't help. Only CompuServe can pick up a broken
transfer as far as I know.
My previous comments on distributors is directed at some
having captive customers for no good reason (and milking them),
not at the distribution method per se. I don't care where I get
a Borland product or from whom as long as I don't have to pay
significantly more than other customers somewhere else.
According to the press release, Frontline Now is only for the
U.S., the old European channel will remain. How this dovetails
with the new "Partner" categories I don't know. But IMO
both "Partners" and distributors in U.S. or Europe should not be
granted any exclusive rights to any markets, period. Too bad for
the spoiled European distributors if they don't like it. I've
actually daydreamed about filing suit in the internationl court
for restraint of trade. |
