[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Bob Purvy]

> It apparently made France Telecom a lot of money since users paid
by the minute, but I think they were kind of embarrassed by the whole
thing.

I believe we now have a corollary to the theorem:

*'Strategic' means you don't make any money.*


It's:

* If you're making money, it's not strategic.*


On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 10:45 AM John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> > Well, don't people in France ever want to look up numbers in Germany,
> > England, and Italy?
>
> Perhaps, but historically the way that worked is that each national telco
> had operators in a room full of out of date foreign phone books.  I doubt
> any of the telcos would have found that compelling.
>
> > Also, there were lots of other apps on top of Minitel, including a dating
> > service! It did replace calls for directory assistance, but then people
> > discovered it could do a lot of other things, too.
>
> Yes, I know.  In our 1995 Internet Secrets, we had a chapter on Minitel
> Rose.  It apparently made France Telecom a lot of money since users paid
> by the minute, but I think they were kind of embarassed by the whole
> thing.
>
> It is a reasonable question why other PTTs didn't just clone Minitel, but
> I don't think at the time there would have been much incentive to hook
> them together.  Apparently they did trials in Belgium and Ireland, but
> without the PTT subsidy to provide the terminals for free, they didn't go
> anywhere.
>
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
> Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
>