WOW! from CompuServe

~ the obit ~

In 1996 I did not have a modem yet. WOW! was announced, launched, declared a failure and switched off before I ever heard a dial tone through a computer speaker, and it was sold only in the United States anyway, so there was no version of my life where I would have seen it. It belongs to the last year in which an American company could still believe that the way onto the internet was through a service rather than through an ISP.

CompuServe had been the serious one since the late seventies. Forums with actual expertise in them, billed by the minute, behind an interface that assumed you knew what a command was. That was a fine business until AOL started mailing floppies to every household in America and it turned out most people wanted the friendly thing, not the good thing.

WOW! was the response, launched in March 1996 as a completely separate service with its own software rather than a redesign of CompuServe. Cartoon interface, with separate spaces for children and adults and parental controls over what the kids could reach. Seventeen dollars ninety five a month, flat, for unlimited access at a time when almost everybody was still metering by the hour.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The pricing was the genuinely forward-looking part, and CompuServe got there before AOL did. The rest went wrong in the ordinary ways. The software was buggy on arrival and the service shut down at random. People reported losing email. For a product whose entire pitch was that it would be easy for beginners, that is the one category of failure it could not survive.

There was also a distribution problem that predated the launch. When Windows 95 shipped, CompuServe's client was not ready to go into the box, so it missed the bundling round that put its competitors in front of every new PC buyer. WOW! arrived alongside Windows 95 SR2, which is the release that started including Internet Explorer, meaning the machine it shipped next to already had a way onto the web that did not involve subscribing to anything.

~ the cracks ~

A hundred and two thousand people signed up. AOL was somewhere past six million. CompuServe was in financial trouble by autumn 1996, facing shareholder suits over what it had told investors, and it did not have the money to fight a consumer war it was already losing.

The announcement came in November 1996: WOW! would close on 31 January 1997, and CompuServe would refocus on business customers. Subscribers were offered the move over to the main CompuServe service, which was the thing they had chosen not to use.

~ the funny part ~

Flat-rate unlimited access, the pricing WOW! was built around and was closing for failing to sell, went mainstream about four weeks after that announcement. AOL switched to $19.95 unlimited on 1 December 1996, and demand immediately exceeded what its network could carry. Members spent that winter listening to busy signals, attorneys general got involved, and AOL ended up paying refunds.

So the idea worked. It just worked for the company with six million subscribers, and it nearly broke that company too. CompuServe itself was sold off in 1998, and the consumer half of it ended up owned by AOL.

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