[asterisk-biz] FWD moving to $30 annual membership fee

[SIP]

Nitzan Kon wrote:
> --- On Tue, 8/12/08, SIP <sip at arcdiv.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm not sure how charging for something that has lasted
>> this long for free will necessarily kill it off.
>>     
>
> I hate to say this, but going from a million users to 800 is
> pretty much the same as killing it. The whole point behind
> FWD is that you can talk for free to people who are connected 
> to the FWD network. If the people are gone - so is FWD.
>   

The million was an estimate of 'registered' users based on rumour, 
hearsay, and idle speculation. ;)

>   
>> That's $24,000/year more than you had before to handle
>> costs such as bandwidth, hosting, hardware maintenance, 
>> etc (none of which are minimal).
>>     
>
> And who's going to pay the sysadmins? If you can find me a
> competent sysadmin that'll work for a $24k/year salary - I 
> have a job for them. ;);)
>   

I'm working under the assumption that they'll be making more money than 
they make currently if they make $0 with a large userbase. I'm sure 
SOMEone's fitting the bill here, and this may simply be a way for him 
(Jeff) to bow out and say, "Look... I'm hemorrhaging money here... you 
HAVE to make some money back." If that's the case, then yes. It's liable 
to be a road to a slow, and possibly unpleasant death with FWD.

>   
>> More important questions for ME would be are they still
>> going to allow incoming calls into their network from 
>> outside? Or will you have to be an official FWD peer (which 
>> is a pay-per-connection peering network) ?
>>     
>
> I don't think this is going to matter, given the user count
> will drop so drastically that there will be no reason to peer
> to them anyway...
>
> I think pretty much the only users who will pay are those who
> will do so in a "thank you for the past" manner. I don't see
> anyone paying because they think they'll derive actual value 
> from the "new" PWD.
>
> So basically, you're left with a handful of users, and zero
> prospects to gain NEW users. A year later the chances of the
> existing users to remain get slimmer.. and the more users
> leave - the less motivation existing users have to remain.
>
> Sounds to me like a recipe for a dying service.
>
> Don't get me wrong- I have nothing against FWD and I wish
> them all the best. But I think they are making a HUGE mistake
> here and they will probably not survive it.
>
> --
> Nitzan Kon, CEO
> Future Nine Corporation
> www.future-nine.com
>
>   
Yeah... it'll be interesting to see where it goes. If they added 
something for the $30, I could see people going for it. But right now, 
they're simply adding promises of bringing out cool things in the 
future. No offense to FWD, but they've been promising cool additions to 
their service since before WE went into business. If one were to wait 
around for FWD's promises, one might be waiting a LONG time -- and 
missing out on the other services out there that DO have something to 
offer.


N.