CompuServe Messages

I think that the market will be driven by what the kids can convince their parents to buy for them. Kids see these as game machines, and that's what they will get excited about. You'll never hear a kid say anything about a VCR or an Encyclopedia being cool. The additional capabilities these machines have and the reference and edutainment titles are more a balm for the parents so they can pat themselves on the back for getting something that is "Good for little Johnny" You and I see many additional uses, but they won't be the initial market – thats kids who want games. How about "CD Platforms" as an acceptable name? You're right of course – the "Information Superhighway" is still vaporware. I was just thinking to myself and my fingers were just typing along (Mavis Beacon has been very good to me, I can nearly keep up with my train of thought these days) Any of these machines will make good set top boxes, provided someone will risk taking the plunge. They are all probably capable of living up to the hype about interactive TV. The CD Magazine would work best for something like "Wired" which is attempting to implement multimedia in a print format. (Mainstream Cyberpunk is the impression I get every time I read it, so I tend to call it the Oxymoron Magazine 😉 Other likely candidates are the gaming publications, the magazines about multimedia,travel magazines, and all these low budget low circulation instructional videos like "Bassfishin' Basics" or "Golf for the Klutz" I personally hope to see a leader like "US News" (each issue already on line here) take the plunge and offer a CD version of the magazine. The format is nearly ideal – short bytes about a lot of topics, and several larger sections with higher info content. Something like "US News" would me much more difficult to switch to a CD format, since their whole operation is geared toward the written word. I'll put my money on "Wired." This whole multimedia concept just leaves me cold. Yes it is a useful tool, but it isn't the paradigm shift that people are crowing about. To me it is just a logical extension of TV married to computers. The entertainment value is high, but the information content is low and I find myself getting bored. Granted, we have barely begun the "Multimedia Revolution" but I tend to compare it to TV, a fairly mature medium, and TV has little appeal beyond B5 these days. (Its looking to be one of the more Machiavellian shows ever on the tube even if every actor playing a human has all the acting ability of a two-by-four. The aliens are much more entertaining)