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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla Game Investing in the eWorld -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teflon who wrote (66)	9/3/1999 7:16:00 PM
From: StockHawk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1817

Why people might stick with AOL: A Letterman style top 10 (possible reasons from a hypothetical AOL user) 1. ease of use 2. inertia/advoidance of a new learning curve - stick with what you know 3. availability - it is available everywhere, its at your friends house, its in all the cyber cafes, etc. 4. can't easily transfer all those bookmarks 5. familiarity - use to the features, know where they are, can get at them quickly 6. like the community - instant messages, other participants, discussion groups (even if someone could "prove" to us that some other forum had a better gorilla discussion area, would we leave SI - no way) 7. everyone has my e-mail address and switching is so annoying 8. they are an adversary to Microsoft and we all hate Microsoft 9. my wife/kids/grandma uses and likes AOL 10. Steve Case is so cute. StockHawk

To: Teflon who wrote (66)	9/4/1999 9:08:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 1817

Teflon, Back to the ease of use issue, but is that a mechanism which creates high switching costs? Someone has probably already responded to this but you're folder is already too successful for me to bother waiting to see. :) I haven't read most of the new material in the manual yet, but I did see that it refers to the "sticky" nature of Internet content. Ease of use is definitely sticky, which keeps bringing people back to the content. Yes, it creates high switching costs though the costs aren't measured in dollars. The best example of that is that switching out of AOL (abandoning it altogether) means giving up your e-mail address and having to notify everyone you know of the new one. Worse, the 16 million people on AOL who get to know you from your posts in the folders can't contact you when you leave AOL. In that and similarly sticky examples, the switching cost is the cost of convenience, ease of use, or whatever. Perhaps you can send a better term to Geoff Moore and get a free copy of version 3.0 when it comes out. --Mike Buckley