I was there. What killed Compuserve was an attempt to build an entire back-end infrastructure, software and hardware, de novo, using immature consumer-grade technology. It was a shocking thing to witness from the inside. The pivot from proprietary to open-standard was not the problem. The problem was trying to build a software ecosystem in which no one knew what they were doing and the OS (Windows NT) didn't work yet, and to populate a data center with almost-but-not-quite redundant commmodity compute and networking. Came time for the big relaunch ("WOW!") and for every person who succeeded in signing up for the new service, ten others tried and failed. No one could come back from that.
I was there. What killed Compuserve was an attempt to build an entire back-end infrastructure, software and hardware, de novo, using immature consumer-grade technology. It was a shocking thing to witness from the inside. The pivot from proprietary to open-standard was not the problem. The problem was trying to build a software ecosystem in which no one knew what they were doing and the OS (Windows NT) didn't work yet, and to populate a data center with almost-but-not-quite redundant commmodity compute and networking. Came time for the big relaunch ("WOW!") and for every person who succeeded in signing up for the new service, ten others tried and failed. No one could come back from that.