Recently, Silicon Prairie heard about a small company that standardized the Microsoft Network as the sole Internet access for its 30 employees. At first, we thought it was a joke.
Two years ago, we knew of 12 companies that provided America Online for employees as the only way to access the Net; today only one of them still gets online that way. The lion’s share of American companies accessing the Web have moved from commercial online services to standard Internet service providers with lightning speed. At headquarters, AOL and Compuserve have given way to Dial-Up Networking and T1 lines. But this aforementioned firm (company officials do not wish to be identified because their MSN decision relates to a proprietary project) is headed in the other direction.
“We didn’t want our employeesexcept for the person whose job it is to run our networkto waste any time thinking about how to connect to the Net,” says the CEO.
“We have a relationship with Microsoft, so we’re already standardized on Windows as our operating system and Internet Explorer as our browser. We have a deal for so many accounts, the software is already built into everyone’s computer, so why not?”
“This is more of a pain at first, but support is much easier,” says the network administrator.
“We’re using MSN version 2.5, which doesn’t really come with everyone’s computer yetI still have to install it from the CD-ROM manually onto everybody’s machine. But I’ve been looking at MSN ever since the first version came out in August 1995 and this is the first one that really works. The setup is faster and safer, the new Internet email client is the first one from Microsoft that doesn’t stink, and Internet Explorer 4, which comes with MSN version 2.5, is the best browser out there. We’ve only been using this for a month, but I must say that the number of support calls I get on a daily basis is half of what it was before when we worked with a regular ISP.”
Like AOL, however, MSN is a consumer service. Does the CEO want his employees hanging out in the Internet Game Zone and Music Central?
“We’ve got a lot of work to do here,” he says.
“Nobody has time to waste on Flight Simulator or anything like that. We need to get at the Web for our jobs, and MSN is an important part of the Web.
MSN has been widely criticized in recent months for member-services pages that are often unavailable, billing confusion and, most of all, its extremely slow email delivery. Messages take the better part of a week to reach their destination and the occasional correctly addressed piece of Internet mail disappears. Why move the company’s email system from one that works fine to one that is the subject of frequent flaming?
“We have been assured that this problem is over. When they moved to the new email client, they also moved to a new server that solves this problem.”
The CEO communicated the above to me in an email message dated Friday at 2:37 pm. It arrived just after noon the following Monday.
