Information discussion
notes
Minitel report
by Zhizhong Li
History:
The original "Minitel" was little plastic TTY terminal with a slide-out keyboard, connected to a normal telephone line using a special "V23 bis" standard. These little boxes, as they still are called, were distributed for free with normal telephone service by the government-owned France Telecom, beginning in 1982.
Since then other hard ware models have developed, no including sophisticated desktop computer versions and even a laptop. Free, and freely-copiable, Minitel terminal emulation software also has been distributed globally by France Telecom for years now.
Commercial providers also have added to the total with enhanced emulation programs. As with the Internet, no one really is able to compute the number of Minitel users.
User Numbers:
Consider the numbers. Minitel is estimated to have 16 million regular users in France, compared to about 8 million for the Internet. The 9 million Minitel terminals in homes and offices are typically accessed to buy train or movie tickets, check stocks, publish small ads, search databases, use chat rooms or send faxes and e-mails to other Minitel or Internet users.
Over 3.9 million French use Minitel for online banking, compared to 1.9 million using the Internet, according to Forrester Research, a technology markey research firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Profits:
France Telecom raked in over 690 million euros ($614 million) in revenues from Minitel services in 2000, 440 million ($392 million) of which was then divvied out among participating companies. These revenues, generated by charging users between 0.6 euros (50 cents) and 1.35 ($1.20) euros per minute, depending on the service accessed, are collected as part of customersí bimonthly phone bills.
Itís attractive for startups because Minitel is a proven business model and enables companies to raise short-term revenue while they are trying to gather second-round funding. Reaching 15 million Minitel users is also a nice way to increase the traffic on their Web.
Minitel vs. Internet:
With its enormous installation of Minitels, large and increasing Minitel usage, and positive Minitel cash flow, France now boasts one of the worldís more significant growth curves in Internet usage.
The greatest practical difficulty has been the slowness of the system. Minitel originally was designed with the lowest common denominator human typist in mind: normal people do not type very fast, and some sacrifices in typing efficiency were made in the design of the original Minitel Keyboards ‚ so it was though that a moderate typing speed of only 75bps would be enough for original Minitel output. As public networking telecommunications standards rose, the Minitel performance speed became embarrassingly slow.
But Minitel has upgraded. By 1995, France Telecom had upgraded equipment located throughout the country, which was set to handle only the old, slower, standard, to handle higher speeds. In 1995, ISDN was generally available.
The French and their Minitel present several challenges to the Internet mind. In France the Internet, enjoying its fantastic growth there as elsewhere, is known as an "Anglo-Saxon" phenomenon: "perfidious Albion," the ancient enemy, somewhat, combined with a double threat, or the Internet as American / English creation.
This is the key to understanding the French and their Minitel, particularly for those already under the sway of the Internet, and even more particularly if they are English or American: the French are outsiders, the first among many who now are embracing the new "Anglo-Saxon" technology, and a look at their very different Minitel just might provide a number of clues as to how these new "outsider" customers will think.
Combination?
Internet and Minitel both are expanding, and users on both systems can communicate back and forth with increasing ease. The question becomes, what will become of this meeting of the two: how will the two combine, or will they?
"Which will bury the other?" is the Minitel/Internet question first asked both by French technocrats and by their U.S. Internet marketer counterparts.
There is a history to this competitive attitude. It goes back farther through several hundred years of US-European rivalry, jealousy, and competition, years which have been usually friendly, occasionally fierce, and on a few occasions even warlike. Minitel / Internet combination issues are not new, but are part of a large and very old set of issues in US-European relations.
There is, however, at least one factor in this supposed Minitel / Internet competition that is both very particular to the technical medium that both systems represent. "Convergence" ‚ of technique, of equipment, of strategies and approaches and applications ‚ increasingly is being seen as the outstanding characteristic of the next phase of digital informationís development.
The Minitel represents the exact opposite of the traditional academic Internet, but the opposite to which the Internet now ironically is being led by its own internal development dynamic. General public access, with commercial applications and terrible political and legal questions of the necessity for and dangers of centralized censorship and control: this is the Minitel already, and it is the "general public" user world toward which the Internet now is careening. The Minitel certainly could profit from some of the indexing sophistication and general technologies of the Internet. Internet Web pages already are beginning to resemble ‚ in their simplicity, pictorial orientation, and increasingly "sales and marketing" approach ‚ the previously much-scorned cartoon-like interface screens of the Minitel.
"Our strategy has been to promote Minitel as a complementary service to Internet ‚ not in direct competition to it," said Nicholas Duforcq, director of France Telecomís Multimedia Division. "We have focused on Minitelís strengths: its ease of use, the security of the network and the rich variety of services it offers to maintain its appeal to French users."
Late last year France Telecom launched I-Minitel, high-speed, easy-to-use software that enables Minitelís services to be accessed from PCs and Macs. The in January, France Telecom unveiled Et hop Minitel, a service which enables companies to publish their Web content on the Minitel, using an application service provider model to store and manage the content.
Future:
Analysts still give Minitel a two-to-five-year window for survival. Thatís enough time for France Telecom and its partner companies to continue making healthy profits form Minitel ‚ and e-commerce firms to try to figure out how to work the same magic for the Internet.