New consumer online services
| Pages | 116-126 |
| Date | 01 February 1995 |
| Published date | 01 February 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045351 |
| Author | Brian Collinge |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Conference Presentation
New consumer online
services*
Brian Collinge
In
bringing this session
into
the Online Conference
we
are
approaching a new era perhaps for some of
us
who are
professional online database
users.
Some of the people on
the platform have very clear ideas what they want to do
with online technology
and
may
have even
relatively little
experience of
the things that you and I have
modestly
been
doing for a number of
years.
The idea is to see where the
subject matter, the content and the delivery mechanisms
are converging, and I hope that by the end of
the
session
you will have a clear idea of what these new consumer
services are
likely to
offer
to the
wider
public,
and
whether
they have an application for us professional online infor-
mation users.
The
best
way to
get started
is to have a series
of presen-
tations by the panel members in as much detail as they
think necessary to describe their products. Not exactly
product
reviews
—
I
hope that they
will
share with
us
some
of their fears as well as some of their boasts of what their
services can
do,
what their technical problems have been,
and
what
advantages
they
see in
moving
into this
market.
The first speaker that I have to introduce is Pascal
Cusset,
who
joined Apple Computer France in 1987 and
Apple
Computer Europe
in
1992.
In his
current position
he
is managing and developing eWorld in Europe. Before
coming
to Apple France he
worked with
Oric
International
in Paris as a product manager for a line of workstations
aimed at creating
and
running videotex services, using the
famous French
service based on the
Minitel.
Pascal Cusset
Apple Computer
(Europe)
Inc.,
Tour
Neptune, 92086 Paris
la
Dèfense Cedex,
France
I would like to describe to you what brought Apple
to
online
services and show you eWorld. It was launched a few weeks
ago
in the UK but maybe
some of
you have
not seen
it
yet,
so
we will
go through
the
product itself
to
show
you how
it works
and
what
were the
concepts behind it.
Apple started its online service apprenticeship nine years
ago with
AppleLink, which
was a
product dedicated
to
e-mail
for
employers.
The system grew and grew, and we ended
up
supporting our customers, our
products,
our partners
and
con-
sultants.
Today
we have
approximately
60 000
subscribers
to
AppleLink. This is really what drove us to rethink what we
could
do
with online services and
three years ago we
decided
to enter this market in another way
— more
ambitious and
more global, targeting more the
mass
market than
the
profes-
sional services which already exist
and are
already
in
place.
Ideas behind eWorld
There
were really four
ideas
behind
eWorld.
First of
all,
apply
the interface experience
we
had.
Apple is
about making inter-
faces easy; it is about user experience in using different tools
and different products and integrating
them
together
—
hard-
ware, operating systems, software peripherals. This is what
has
made
Apple different from
the
beginning
—
expertise in-
tegration and
the way
people interact
with
products.
This was
a key driver to eWorld and we applied this expertise to an
online
service,
because
we
think
to
reach the
mass
market
we
need a clean, well lit place where people will find it easy to
navigate and find information. This is in contrast to profes-
sional, high value services existing today which require that
people are trained; they will always use a very limited set of
services which they master very
well because
they need them
for their job
as
professionals.
The second idea was to integrate new computer technolo-
gies.
We
have all heard about multimedia —
images,
sounds,
video and so on. Also the networks are not completely ready
yet because they are a bit slow, even at
14
400 baud. Obvi-
ously you will not do live video or videoconferencing. How-
ever,
we want
at
least to
build
the
technology
into
the product
to support these things that are on the way, so that when we
introduce gateways to higher speed networks, ISDN, X25,
TCP/IP
and so on in
the coming
months,
all the
technology to
* Edited transcript of panel session at
the 18th
International Online
Information
Meeting,
London, 7 December 1994. Chairman:
Brian Collinge, Managing
Director,
Learned Information.
116 The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 1995
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