On Dec 29, 2009, at 12:59 PM, Dan White wrote:
On 29/12/09 12:20 -0500, Sachs, Marcus Hans (Marc) wrote:
Better than the typical "block outbound 25" filtering we do now. In fact, in a perfect world ISPs would offer residential customers "reduced experience" versions of castration that decrease the cost along with decreasing what you have access to. At the bottom level it would be essentially a thin client running a terminal service (or an emulated thin client using a web browser) with all applications "in the cloud" and nothing sitting on the home PC; mid-level would be web plus common email clients and chat/IM; high level adds popular apps like Skype, P2P, games, etc.
I think that a fairly large percentage of homes that only want access to online content and email would be very happy with the bottom tiers. Many would probably like the cloud approach where all of the crazy updating, rebooting, etc. is taken out of the hands of the consumer. WebTV, meet the 21st century.... :)
The customers in the market for such a service would be least likely to understand your explanation of the service.
Do you offer a new lower tier service, or rebrand your residential service, and try to explain how you're taking away services they probably don't need. It's been my experience that if you tell someone you're taking away something, they tend to value it even if they don't know what it is.
As well they should. As well we all should. None of us knows precisely what we're going to absolutely require, or merely want/prefer, tomorrow or the next day, much less a year or two from now. Unless, of course, we choose to optimize (constrain) functionality so tightly around what we want/need today that the prospect of getting anything different is effectively eliminated. TV