Jerry,
>
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/10/23/011023hnnetpricing.xmlThanks for the Muglia quotes -- I was there at the PDC when he presented that and did a good bit of followup investigation afterwards. It seems that the initial rollout of the services will not even include the $1000 version, but will start at the $10,000 developer-fee level. Their plan is to ramp up with a "crawl, walk, run" approach and they don't want the supposed masses of $1000-fee developers overwhelming them at first.
It remains to be seen just how many of us will pay the fees to use MS storage and services, and I don't have a good official answer yet about whether the "free services" (Passport, Alerts and Presence) will be free to developers or will require the developer fees.
In general, they're counting on the concept that it's cheaper to use what they provide than write your own and host it on your own servers.
>When AARP invited my wife and I to join they offered a lot of freee 'incentives', none of which were usefull or of value to use.
>I suspect the same will be the case here.
.NET Alerts is a very compelling technology and I can already imagine dozens of good uses for it in typical applications. Examples shown by Great Plains included alert to customer when an out-of-stock item is checked into the warehouse with one-click ordering, shipping alerts with one-click connection to the package-tracking site (UPS, FEDEX, etc). This is one enabling technology that lets the imagination run rampant with customer-service ideas that are not dependent on email or websites.
