Twice in the past week I have been asked in mail which is better: is it smarter for a newcomer to computing to connect to an online service provider (OSP) like Compuserve or America Online, or through a local Internet service provider (ISP).
Two years ago I know what my answer would be. OSPs are centralized collections of databases, assembled to meet subscriber's needs for information, research, and entertainment. Compuserve or America Online are like YMCAs -- you go there when you want everything in one place. They existed as freestanding alternatives to the Internet.
ISPs, by contrast, are hardly places at all. They are just local doorways to the global Internet, a decentralized network of networks.
And I would have enthusiastically recommended an ISP over an OSP. With them the Internet is the company's product, not the company's competition. ISPs tended to be cheaper, their Internet connections tended to be cleaner, and if you needed help setting yourself up, they'd coach you by phone, a more personal level of service then you'd get from the big nationwide services.
But now I'm not so sure. The past couple of weeks I've been playing with Compserve's new software for 32-bit (Windows 95) PCs. It's a vast improvement over the herky-jerky Internet software they provided just a year ago.
Back then, Compuserve Information Manager 2.01 (CIM) worked in two modes -- a regular connection and a separate connection for surfing the World Wide Web. In computing, when you see the word "mode," that's a signal to run away. Modes means that the computer has to shift from one way of doing something to another. The shifting is seldom graceful, and with CIM it was quite awkward.
At this time, both Compuserve and America Online were pursuing aggressive marketing campaigns in which they deluged people with free log-on disks for these moded products. Tens of thousands of people came to the Internet this way, and many were quickly frustrated by the awkwardness of the software and the facelessness of the services themselves.
After you used CIM for a few months, Compuserve would urge you to upgrade to a newer version by downloading it for free. Now, with the new software, called Compuserve 3 or Cs3, downloading is no longer possible. Cs3 is so humongous, and having Windows 95 so critical, that you can only get it by having Compuserve mail it to you on CD-ROM.
Anyway, since I got my disk and installed it, I have been very impressed, and the reason is that Cs3 is modeless. You can switch back and forth between Compuserve's internal data to sites on the World Wide Web with no weird delays. The screen is a bit different, because web sites don't allow the allow the same cookie-cutter interactivity that Compuserve's home sites do. But the delay in switching is nil, which is exciting.
Using a standard Winsocket PPP Internet connection, Cs3 turns the whole balky mechanism of Compuserve into an Internet anteroom. The browsing software is Microsoft Internet Explorer, which seems poised finally to overtake Netscape Navigator for browsing bragging rights. The moment I booted up Cs3, the Internet Explorer crouching inside the program scoured my hard drive, found my Netscape 3.0, and in a single instant loaded all the bookmarks I had painstakingly culled for over a year.
Now, I'm a pessimist about these things. I didn't think the big online services would ever get the Internet right. I figured they would overprice it or get bogged down in proprietary programs, or worse, censor incoming stuff from the Net. But that hasn't happened. Cs3 gives me the very best of the two desirable worlds -- almost:
It gives me Compuserve's internal data world, which is like the reference section of a very good library.
And it gives me very flexible, very powerful access to the World Wide Web, less a "world" than an entire universe of data sources.
So when people ask me which way to go, my answer is that the new Compuserve will take you equally well to both places.
Now, about that "almost." OSPs are still not. Compuserve is not a good place to base a web site. If you want to open up your own quickie mart along the info superhighway, you're better off with a local ISP than one of the big online services. Although I expect that will change too over the next year.
The other is expense: Compuserve may connect fluidly with the Internet, but Compuserve nonmembers on the Internet cannot connect back with it. Compuserve continues to charge premium fees for its databases, and that will scare away a lot of new customers.
How does all this shake out? For Compuserve, it's hard to say. They've been losing money for years, and their mission is eroded a little bit every time someone scoots away from its home offerings and onto the Internet. Giving subscribers the Internet underscores how outdated and overpriced their own data offerings are.
But for consumers, now is a good time to hop an old trolley with new wheels. Compuserve has been around since personal computing began. Once the giant, it has been eclipsed by America Online in size and notoriety. But its interface, long reviled for its endlessly nested menus and curious command structure, is showing signs in its dotage of renewed life.
Before you sign onto a local service, give the new Compuserve a look, and figure out if it's worth the extra money to you. |
