Did we just descended to 1997 just because of credit crisis? Just now I saw a Netzero commercial, featuring CEO Mark Goldston, promoting dial-up connection. Yep, you read this right – a Netzero (definitely a name from 90s) is promoting a dial-up, claiming “it takes you to the same Internet as broadband”, just does it cheaper. Now, I don’t know about the average Joe’s needs on the internet (maybe all he does is checks his e-mail using that good old Lynx browser.
But if he’s anything close to average Joe I know he checks his e-mail using webmail interface which is pretty heavy load on my scale – wheather you’re using Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail or your provider’s web mail interface. Then he checks the weather. Just as an example – the weather.com’s total weight is over 100KB. Then maybe he reads some news (NYTimes.com – 322KB, CNN.com – 663KB). Now the scary part starts – his girlfriend, or wife, or daughter wants to do some shopping online. Zappos.com is 106KB, Macy’s is 335KB and SaksFifthAvenue (in case they’ve got money to spend) is 236KB. And don’t even think of watching any video – YouTube or Hulu.
So, maybe someone out there knows what’s Netzero counts on. From my point of view – this is just a bad waste of good money. Might have donated to charity, that ought to work out better.