Where now for dial-up providers?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-07-30 01:53:08 - Graham EllisWe're in a fast moving business, and times change; last year's success company may have based its success on a transient market place that's overtaken by events and it'll have to come up with a new niche and adapt and adopt or die. It does have a strong hand in doing this with its existing customer base, retained profits and skilled technical workforce. The alternative is shrinking - perhaps as part of another organisation - or perhaps going out of business as happened last week to Granville Technologies (I hope I have that right), who assembled the Time and Tiny range of computers and sold them from their chain of around 80 UK stores. Victims of a changing market - 80 stores, 1500 employees and a largely national (UK) market simply didn't give them the volume to compete with the Dells of this world.
The dial in ISP is another business that's having to change - be it Wanadoo, AOL, Demon or another, they're hemoraging dial in customers at the moment - loosing many accounts per month as people get Broadband connected. But if they've been providing a good, appreciated, used service with more than just connectivity they have a big advantage over Granville - they can still offer their "more than" services over the broadband connection and they can offer a continuity of access to their services. Whether (if) people are prepared to continue to pay for those extra services when they purchase broadband is not something that I have the marketing information to comment on, but these companies do have the ability to retain users even if those users are not now paying customers.
Why would an ISP want to be giving its services free to a past purchasers of its services? Well - I'm sure it would prefer them still to be paying, but in the new business model there's other ways of generating income. For example, I search using Google's services, but I don't pay Google for searching. Rather, as a business I pay them for click-through ads and I'm happy to do so knowing how wide a range of interested parties they reach. And as a business, Google *may* come up with something new that's so good that I (as a searcher) want to buy from them. And they'll sure as heck appreciate having me there "on their books" when they want to make that offer.