Fifteen years ago in France, you could find a strange little box
in millions of homes. From that box you could access the Yellow
Pages, buy railway and plane tickets, play games, and even chat with
very nice ladies. That little box was a passive, (almost) text-only
terminal equipped with a keyboard and connected to the phone
line. Its name was Minitel. It was invented in 1982, and provided
thousands of online services ten years before the World Wide Web
became famous.
The story of Minitel is exquisitely French. In France, most
success stories involve good technology and large financial and
political support from the government. It is not a matter of corporate initiative and smart
marketing (see Microsoft). It may shock people who live in
corporate-oriented economies, but that's the way it works in this
country. And it usually works fine (see TGV, Airbus,
Ariane...).
Therefore Minitel was created by the state-owned, monopolistic mail
and telephone company. External companies were allowed to create their
own Minitel sites, which were referred to by a kind of URL which
indicated the communication cost and the company name: for example
'36-15 SNCF' for the railway company, '36-15 Renault' for the car
company.
Because the terminal was free, it pervaded French homes within a few
years. However, the communications were very expensive (typically 1
franc or 15 US cents per minute), because the fees were partly
distributed to the external company that owned the Minitel site. These
companies made a lot of money, but the customers did not
complain since there was nothing else to compare with. Also, the
network was completely proprietary and closed, but again, how could
anybody imagine a free and open worldwide network then?
On of the main advantages of Minitel was its extreme simplicity: you
could go to your post office, take one of these boxes, come back home
and plug it: it worked at once. To use it, you only had to press a
button and type the site name. The thing was reliable because it had
no disk, no memory, no blue screen of death.
So Minitel was great, and nothing in the world could be compared
to it then. But the same reasons that produced the success were
responsible for France being late when the Internet came out of the
research labs in the 90s. French companies, which could earn so much
easy money with Minitel fees, were reluctant to build high-cost
Web sites with no immediate benefit. In the same way, France
Télécom, the telephone company that manages the Minitel network now,
hesitated a lot before turning to the Internet.
Because France Télécom and the French government failed to enhance
it, open it, modify its pricing and promote it, it remained a 100%
French technology. Nowadays it's slow, ugly and expensive,
although millions of people are still using it. It was one the most
important lost opportunity of the century for the French economy. Had
it been invented by some US company, probably the Web would be called
Minitel today. As I said before, that's the way it works in this
country.