Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> This meant that even the poorest of households contained a set, subsidised by the taxpayer.
It was a freemium model, France Telecom was making a lot of money and was able to fund the Minitel without tax payer money. In fact, France Telecom was a cash cow for the government, not a single time took France Telecom money from the tax payers.
Also, my grand parents were able to use it, basically everybody could use it, the Internet took off extremely well in France across all the generations because it was possible to say: "this is like the Minitel, just type here the address, and there you go".
I did introduction courses to learn how to use Internet in the late 90's and for the 100's of people I helped, the Minitel analogy was perfect and allowed us to move forward extremely fast.
Edit: Thinking about it, this is the same model as the app store. To sell on the app store, you need to ask Apple first. You had to ask France Telecom at that time.
Thinking about it, this is the same model as the app store.
Does Apple allow multiple alternative app stores? If not, then Android should eventually make it obsolete, since you do not have to 'ask Google' to create and market a mobile app there.
Furthermore if the app store barriers filter out poor quality apps and allow in high quality ones, then it actually adds value.
»"not a single time took France Telecom money from the tax payers"
France Telecom's capital investments provided by the government and cheap financing rates are forms of subsidy. Further, they get bailed out - last I remember is €9 billion in 2002 [1].
And the BBC is biased, really, especially if you look at it from a non Western point of view. The thing is, you (and me) live in the Western capitalistic world, that is, we cannot assess easily the bias, because our references are including it. This is a very interesting topic but far too controversial to be discussed in the comments here.
So… it was subsidized by the taxpayer in a way, or am I missing something?
This is not the same than let say EDF, the French energy monopoly, where all the research to get nuclear energy was funded by the government through the CEA[1]. France Telecom had enough money to fully fund its research centres. They had in fact some of the best research labs.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissariat_%C3%A0_l%27%C3%89n...
But seriously, why some network system layers failed and others thrived? It is not protocol. Gopher was also TCP/IP based, and it has disappeared...
The web had a much, much faster "OODA" loop than competing platforms, and it had a much easier route to being more widely used. Sometimes we fail to see elegance because we see right through it.
As was initial development of the Web - at least indirectly through CERN.
The extent of CERN's sponsorship of the development of the Web was that Tim Berners-Lee obtained permission from his boss to work on it during work hours. His boss's main reason for giving the permission was that he wanted CERN to start evaluating NeXT, Inc, as one of CERN's suppliers, and development of this Web thing seemed just as good a test of NeXT's marketing claims about the excellence of its development environment as anything else.
Probably the biggest way that CERN helped was by providing a good living for a relatively large population of potential early adopters of the Web. (Before the "discovery" of the internet by the mainstream media in 1993, adoption of the internet was almost completely by very-high-IQ folks.)
ADDED. The much more important point, though, is the fact that when Tim BL started developing the Web, the Internet was a very fertile and welcoming environment for experimentation. If you are on Linux or Mac, take a look at /etc/services and realize each of the port numbers you see listed in that file is an experiment. (Note that most of the least successful experiments might not have made it into that file.) I tend to agree with those who say that if Tim BL hadn't invented the Web, it would not have taken long for someone else to invent something similar (something that allows owners of web sites to create experience on graphical UIs that are more compelling that the plain text that was dominant on the Internet till then).
In discussions like this about which individuals and organizations caused an important technological development, it is important to keep in mind one's reasons for wanting to know. My reason for wanting to know how much of the Web and the Internet was caused by government is that it helps me decide how likely government-employed or government-funded individuals are to contribute to future important innovations.
Xavier Niel is the canonical example of that (the guy behind Free mobile/dsl).