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To: Jon Koplik who wrote (18638)	11/20/1998 12:17:00 PM
From: straight life	Respond to of 152472

Digital delivery: Taking the next step By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, ZDNet It's getting increasingly hard to overestimate the potential of electronic commerce. International Data Corp. estimates $30 billion worth of goods and services will be sold over the Web in 1998. As Thanksgiving approaches, it looks like three companies alone could account for almost as much. Intel Corp. is selling the equivalent of $12 billion worth of computer chips per year. Dell Computer Corp. is on a $3.7 billion-per-year rate. Cisco Systems Inc. is about the same. These companies all sell hardware. And the secret to their success is convenience. Ordering products through the Web is easier for purchasing managers than any other way of getting deliveries. It wasn't necessarily going to be this way. The assumption long has been that the kind of products that would move best on the Internet are goods that move across the Internet -- digital goods, such as research reports, music and computer programs. All products that in their entirety can be transported as bits and bytes. People who fear the process of downloading software are now seen as Luddites, nervous creatures who can't get through life without the security blankets of manuals and compact discs. Into the breach naturally stepped your intrepid correspondent. The object: to test the current state of the process. A quick surf of computer product sites led me back to the folks who made the idea of downloading software over the Internet almost synonymous with their name, software.net Corp. Only now they call their business Beyond.com. Beyond.com has a clear interface and step-by-step instructions for effective downloading. Besides, it fulfills the promise of digital delivery. The price of the software is less, and there are no shipping and handling charges. The choice of product seemed safe. Go for the upgrade of a product that I'd been using with great satisfaction for years. My pick: Eudora Pro 4.1 from Qualcomm Inc., to replace Eudora 3.0. Sadly, the process of downloading still leaves much to be desired. In the time it took to get the new version downloaded, I could have traveled the 20 miles to my nearest CompUSA, bought the software in shrink-wrap form and been back home eight times. Even using a 128,000-bit-per-second connection, it still took from 8 p.m. one evening to 8:30 a.m. the next morning. Most of the problem: burps, which stopped the download in midstream. Yet, who really wants to stare at a screen for two or three hours to watch for a little indigestion? Sorry, you should be able to walk away -- or go to sleep -- and still get a safely and completely delivered product. That was only the start of the problems. Later, it became clear that installing this particular software was a mistake. The window-pane feature, where a user can see the start of each piece of e-mail before actually clicking on its listing in an In Box, was not working just right. Worse, the program crashed repeatedly in the process of sending responses to incoming messages. Not healthy. Reinstalling the new program did no better. Reinstalling 3.0 was even worse; it would not start up, as it searched for a plug-in that only 4.1 could use. You can figure it out from here. The intrepid test user wound up uninstalling 4.1. Getting things back the way they were also meant reinstalling Windows 95 and Eudora 3.0. A day used up going nowhere. The problem? A call to the Eudora support line produced interesting news that probably was in the manual I didn't get. Eudora 4.1 requires components of Microsoft Corp.'s 4.0 version of Internet Explorer to function properly. That struck a bell. After having downloaded Eudora 4.1, a dialog box popped up on screen saying that Eudora 4.1 had not detected the latest versions of Apple QuickTime and Internet Explorer on this machine. Needing to get on with work and away from the tedium of downloading, I chose to download QuickTime (quickly, I hoped) and avoid IE 4.0. Netscape Navigator 4.0 was working quite well for me, thank you. But that's one of the unexpected benefits of market dominance. Somehow, you can manage to get your products integrated into other companies' products, without much fanfare. The lesson, though, is this: To make the delivery of digital goods a commonplace event, the processes must be honed, step-by-step, for every product that is to be transported this way. The step that went wrong here was the dialog box. It should have said that IE had to be downloaded or the software would not work properly. Instead, it was an option, left to personal preference. For software sellers, the lesson is clear. To make digital commerce work, "usability" testing now must begin before the product is actually used, not after.

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (18638)	11/20/1998 12:22:00 PM
From: SKIP PAUL	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 152472

PCS_w up 4 9/16 Friday November 20, 11:10 am Eastern Time RESEARCH ALERT - Sprint PCS started NEW YORK, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Lehman Brothers and Warburg Dillon Read said Friday they started coverage of Sprint PCS Group, the stock created to track the personal cellular business of Sprint Corp. (NYSE:FON - news). -- Warburg Dillon Read said it started Sprint PCS with a strong buy rating and a target price of $25 a share. -- Lehman said it started Sprint PCS with a buy rating and a 1999 price target of $21 a share. Estimates earnings per share at a loss of $6.18 in 1998 and a loss of $4.75 in 1999. -- Standard & Poor's said Thursday Sprint PCS would replace steel company Armco Inc (NYSE:AS - news) in the S&P 500 index. -- In notes, both Lehman and Warburg said they had not expected Sprint PCS shares to initially be included in the S&P 500. Index fund managers that track the S&P 500 will not have to divest their holdings in Sprint PCS now that the shares have been added to the index. -- Shares trading on a when-issued basis were up 4-5/16 to 17-1/8.