Net Gains: Jan 29, 1999 - one of Lyndon Cerejo's published articles

To,
Mr. Amitabh Kumar
VSNL

Dear Mr. Kumar,

Thank you so much for your email dated Jan 23rd, sent to me and the other lakh and a half Internet subscribers. You directed us all to your new portal site http://internet.vsnl.net.in to register for free web hosting - "just a part of your commitment to us valued customers". Excited by the prospect of yet another free homepage, I rushed to the address mentioned and started creating yet another free homepage.

Since you specifically asked for feedback, comments and suggestions, here goes:

It's nice to note that your terms and conditions are shorter than most other free homepage providers. However, unlike other free homepage providers, you only allow your subscribers to use your services. But since you've had a three year head start as a monopolist ISP, almost every Sumeet, Ujjal and Furqaan are your subscribers, so that's no problem.
Sadly enough, you've banned thousands of student account holders from this service, just as you did with your "@vsnl.com" service for shorter email addresses. Those students have little other option than to turn to other sites like Geocities (www.geocities.com), Tripod (www.tripod.com) and Rediff Personal Homepages (members.rediff.com) for their free homepages. As for shorter email addresses, they'll have to resort to free email forwarding services like Iname (www.iname.com), or Netforward (www.netforward.com) that offer a wider variety of email addresses!
You've graciously offered us all 1 Mb of space on your server. Surely, I wouldn't go to other free homepage services that give offer a minimum of 10 Mb space now, would I?
Tomorrow, if I decide not to renew my Internet account with you, but choose another ISP like Satyam Online (www.satyamonline.com) or MTNL, or whoever, you mention I will lose my homepage too. Which means if I tell everyone about this homepage, I'll have to inform all of them once again that I've got a new homepage somewhere else. Imagine all that trouble - I think I'd rather stay with a free homepage service that keeps my homepage active for life!
What I found nice is the URL I get: you allow me to choose from addresses like:
When I finally identified myself and logged on, I tried your builder. I have to say you're gonna get a lot of flashy, gaudy beginner pages, since you've given them animated images, a variety of 14 divider lines, and 10 background images. Maybe in the next phase, you'd like to offer slightly more sober choices for those who've graduated to the next level of webpage building.
Instead of settling for that, I moved onto the advanced level where I could either paste my HTML code into a text box, or could upload my own page. Since I already had several pages on other sites, I tried uploading a file, but some error about incorrect logon kept popping up, so I tried pasting the HTML in the text box you've so thoughtfully provided. It worked! ~~You may want to see the results at: now defunct URL.~~ I know, I know, it's just one page and it's a mirror of my page at my domain http://www.strategist.net/, but I was just testing it out. I hope you don't find anything unacceptable on that page, because I'll wake up tomorrow morning to find out that you've deleted my page without prior notice (as per your terms and conditions, of course).
There's something I can't resist asking you though: Is it just a coincidence that you started offering this service now that private ISPs are in the race too? Otherwise we would have this service offered three years ago, barabar na? But who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

I hope my suggestions, comments and feedback are of some use to you. And all the best to you!

Your ~~faithful~~ subscriber,

Lyndon Cerejo.

PS. You may want to check your email system. A lot of subscribers haven't got your email offer till now.

	Net Gains (Jan 29, 99)
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