[JA] $10 Customer
- From: jim.henderson@xxxxxxxx
- To: juno_accmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 13:41:26 -0400
> Subject: [JA] Re: $10 Customer
> From: thepccat@xxxxxxxx
Meow> Many on this list have become used to using Juno, or
> even "grown up with"Juno [I resemble the latter remark].
Me too, pretty much. I had E-mail in the early 1990s from BBSes, lost it
when they went out of business, and regained it when Juno started.
Meow> It is scary and sad to see an organization with such a
> major fraction in the marketplace continue being so dense,
> creating collateral damage, on their announced way to
> having all paid subscribers at $10 and up.
Quite so. I can speculate that they lost their smart people, so far as
anyone was smart, when the dry wind of last year blew away all immediate
prospects of a profit. I can understand why free service cannot be the
basis of a company this size anymore and why they are attempting to
shift. What bothers me is not the morality of changing their plans, nor
the impact it has on us dozens of listateers who know how to roll with
the punches, but how clumsily the job is being done.
Juno's monthly time allowance is, for all practical purposes, secret.
When someone goes over their limit, they simply get disconnected. This
suggests to the ignorant masses that Juno has become so unreliable that
they have to go to AOL.
A Frenchman in the early 19th Century remarked about a notoriously
devious and unsuccessful political maneuver: "A crime? This is worse
than a crime. It's a blunder!" The problem is not that hundreds of
relatively sophisticated users like us are feeling betrayed and
alienated. Juno can afford to lose you and me. The problem is that
hundreds of thousands of potentially paying subscribers, millions of
dollars in revenues, are being lost through simple blunders. If Juno
alone is making such a mess of things, what will happen if the merger
goes through and an attempt is made to slide all the free users over to
NetZero? Will millions find themselves cut off and clueless?
After signing up my customer in a middle class part of Brooklyn, I
bicycled over the Gowanus Canal to a playground where I found a boy, now
thirteen, whom I hooked up to Juno a year earlier than that one. While
he was defeating me at a game that involves sliding checkers into a
plastic rack to form four in a row, I asked about his free Juno Web.
It's working fine but he is unaware that the company is changing its
policy about free service.
This kid doesn't have a bicycle anymore or a printer. His mother, a
hairdresser, is unlikely to be able to afford $100 per year for Internet
service. I don't know what I'm going to do about him. Well, I intend to
rehabilitate an old inkjet for him, but as for his Web service, I don't
know. At least he'll still have free mail. I hope.
Meow> ...you could also just walk away and go on to something else.
Easy for us, all right. I just hate to walk way from a never stated but
nonetheless implied promise to an intelligent child in the ghetto.
- Jim in Manhattan, an island not as wide or high as Staten Island, but a
charming home.
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