Michael Turner wrote:
> Jani writes, in part:
> > ...but I find the concept of L-mode fairly surprising. Proprietary
> > crippled terminal and proprietary walled-in service from a monopoly
> > provider -- I thought that particular business model died out with
> > the Minitel?
>
> The Minitel comparison was also made with i-mode itself, but didn't
> seem to slow that phenomenon down much.
Actually, Jakob Nielsen (whom I presume you're citing here, cf.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010107.html) was lambasting WAP.
Let's draw a table:
Minitel L-mode WAP i-mode
Fixed line Yes Yes No No
Per-minute Yes Yes Yes No
pricing
Walled garden Yes Yes Yes No
Clunky device Yes Yes Yes Yes
I think that with per-minute pricing and the unbreakable walled garden
approach NTT is shooting itself in the foot very badly. Yes, the
idea of sneaking in the Internet via your trusty old landline phone
as outlined in the Japan Inc article is interesting, but is there
any advantage to getting L-mode instead of i-mode? Much has been
made of the fact that most i-mode fanatics seem to be young people
with an affinity for cool gadgets and lots of money and time to burn,
whereas L-mode's target audience seems to be closer akin to sedentary
grannies who are afraid of computers and cellphones...
> And Minitel was very
> popular in its time - people ran up huge bills just like they do now
> with keitai; and a lot of Japanese may never have a home computer.
Minitel was very popular in its time -- in France. And only France,
although similar systems were tried in many places. One reason for
Minitel's popularity was the lack of alternatives, for a long time
French government policy was to oppose public Internet access at all
costs, and by the time they finally did they were years behind and
Minitel was obsolete.
Cheers,
--
Jani Patokallio (jpatokal@iki.fi) / HCI Lab, University of Tokyo
[漸] Soldered to the funk with a working class rupture
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Fri Apr 27 06:09:36 2001