[ NNSquad ] Re: What do users want

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

We've had a lot of discussion here that makes assumptions about what 
users want.  Among other things:
  . "All you can eat" internet access
  . Ease of use
  . Low prices
  . No surprises
  . Unlimited usage, including running servers.

Let's look at this a little more closely.  We say users want X and Y and 
Z; the problem being that I doubt any of us here is a "typical" user. 
We're the most knowledgeable 1%.  Most people here are (I'd guess) 
capable of downloading, installing, _and configuring_ a measurement 
tool, especially if somebody else tells us what configuration parameters 
to set.

That's not going to be true of the average user.  I swear to you that I 
know somebody who is convinced that if he does anything besides look at 
net sites, his computer will burn up or melt down.  He's even afraid to 
download and keep, say, a PDF or WMV file.  After he had a stroke that 
left him with one side paralyzed, I configured his computer to have 
sticky keys so he could use it one-handed.  And I'm not even familiar 
with Macs - I had to use the help to figure out how to do it.(*)

Now I'm not saying he's typical either, but he's probably around the 
10th or even 25th percentile of random net users out there.

So to a large extent Brett is right.  _Most_ of his customers aren't 
going to care about P2P.  All they're going to do is surf, shop, maybe 
read Wikipedia.  And a lot of porn.  You better believe people care 
about porn.  That was the killer app that made the net the success that 
it is.  Surprised the heck out of me, but then I'm an old fogy who 
suffers Moore's Law shock every couple of years.  [That's when you look 
up and see that fast computers are being measured in _Tera_flops, when 
you can remember when the fastest supercomputers were reaching toward a 
couple of Megaflops.  Or your wife asks you to guess how much an 
external 250GB drive costs, and you guess too high by a factor of 4.]

(*) I also made the mistake of trying to back up his computer onto mine. 
 I ended up with directories with names that aren't legal under 
Windoze, so I can't even delete the junk.  One of these days I'll hook 
up a mac to my desktop again and delete that huge tree.

So, what do _I_ think the average user wants?  Basically the first four 
things above.  But interpreted a little differently than we think of it.

"All you can eat"?  Not exactly.  What they want is "no surprises".  If 
they buy net access for $40/month, then they expect to pay $40/month 
(plus a few odd $ for taxes).  Not to find an extra $30 tacked onto 
their bill because they watched a few episodes of their favorite shows 
on CBS's website.  So "all you can eat" really means "all that _most_ 
users _will_ eat".  It doesn't matter to them if you get cut off after 
300 GB/month(+), because they'll never hit that limit.  (That represents 
using the full 1.5MB/sec "burst rate", continuously for 2 hours a day, 
every day of the month.)  Brett, or any other ISP, needs to provision 
his system for his average customer's usage, plus a little extra to 
allow for inevitable growth.  If he gets one or two customers who want a 
lot more than that, he can throttle them down and/or suggest that they 
buy a higher tier of service with more bandwidth and/or a higher usage 
limit.

(+) substitute whatever limit realistically represents your user's 
expected usage.

They also want "ease of use."  That translates as "I don't want to mess 
with it, I just want it to work."  Most users are intimidated by 
Outlook's or Thunderbird's setup screen.  They don't want to have to 
mess with it, and that's a large part of why ISPs need support staff -- 
to tell Joe LUser how to get his email working again after Outlook lost 
his settings.  And I've noticed that most ISPs don't even bother to 
support any browser except IE, any mail client except Outlook/Outlook 
Express (plus whatever is most common on the Macintosh this year).  Why? 
 Because Firefox and Opera and Konquerer and the other browsers out 
there account for maybe 2% of customers -- combined.  So it's not worth 
the money to write scripts for the support drones to follow for those 
other programs.

P2P?  Most users are way too unsophisticated to configure a P2P server, 
or any other kind of server.  It's no wonder Brett can (mostly) get away 
with telling his users they aren't allowed to run a server.  Yeah, sure, 
I can just see the average non-programmer user configuring Tomcat.  Not 
gonna happen.

That said, Brett really does have an "attitude problem".  To a large 
extent he thinks of his exceptional users as enemies, using terms like 
"stealing".  What he really needs to do is think of them as potential 
_extra_ revenue, that just need to be educated.  "Hey, want to run your 
own servers?  No problem, we'll even help you set it up, only $X setup 
and $Y/month."

Finally, they (we) want "low prices".  "Low price" of course means 
different things to different people.  One of the big jobs of any ISP is 
to figure out what combination of service level, provisioning, support, 
and bandwidth will draw the highest profit.  Not necessarily the maximum 
number of users -- lowering your prices will always get at least a few 
more users.  But the highest value of
   #-users * per-month-fee - (cost-of-bandwidth + cost-of-support-staff 
+ cost-of-cables/transmitters/whatever-else-your-network-is-built-out-of).

All those costs change almost daily, and the expectations of your users 
change all the time too, plus your competitor(s) (cable if you're a DSL 
provider, DSL if you're a cable provider, wireless like Brett) are 
contstantly adjusting _their_ prices, which affects how many customers 
you can retain at a given price point.

I'm glad I'm not running an ISP.

Btw, one of the things I mentioned above -- user expectations -- that is 
subject to change without notice (or damn little notice).  You never 
know when the next "killer app" _will_ require running servers (and 
provide a system that configures them without you having to think about 
it).  And any ISP that has decided hard line "no servers" is going to 
have to rethink things in a big hurry -- or be replaced by somebody who 
_is_ flexible.

Lastly, No surprises: If I _do_ happen to use more bandwidth than the 
typical user, I don't want a big surcharge on my bill.  And I don't want 
my internet access cut off, as Rogers was threatening to do in their big 
contretemps.  "Graceful degradation" is called for -- just slow the 
usage hogs down to a level you can afford to support.  But, again, this 
should be based on how much they use, not on which ports they connect to.


 [ As others have noted, a major problem is unwritten limits and unspecified
   rules that are invoked via the broad, general wording ("interfering with
   other customers", etc.) in ISP Terms of Service agreements.  That sort
   of enforcement philosophy might have worked in the old Soviet Union, but
   is inappropriate today, even if specifying the limits explicitly can make
   things easier for abusers.  Fair is fair.

   Secondly ... porn?  Porn?  Porn on the Internet as a major desired
   application?  C'mon, "Normal people don't sit at home and look
   at porn on the Internet":
   http://youtube.com/watch?v=YRgNOyCnbqg (mature audiences only).

                    -- Lauren Weinstein
                       NNSquad Moderator ]