TWO LETTERS
The Two Four Letters: A Tech and Member Both wishing to Save WOW!
Ok, it's not two anymore- its been updated.
Ed. note: this page was originally published in Dec. '96 as part of a Save WOW! effort, at the now-defunct WOW! Member Organization site.
2 Employees write about their disappointment while two Members write in an effort to save WOW!. What you can do: According to many, the Wow@wow.com is full and letters will be sent back. How about E-Mailing Scott Kauffman? Its 70003.6706@compuserve.com. You can email Bob Massey at (Ed. note: Massey, then CEO of CompuServe, has since resigned.)
Letter One: The Tech
Greetings from WOW!, the online service that once had so much to give but will now leave us all with nothing. To say that the mood is overcast around here would be to understate the huge torrent of rants, raves and teary eyes of sadness and anger that have filled the office in the last two days. The bottom line, folks, is that it all comes down to this: money. Moolah. Dough. The Big Green. Keep in mind that our parent company, H & R Block, does people's taxes for a living. Do you think they really care about artistic quality? What's worse is that even from a business standpoint the whole operation was a shambles. CompuServe knew they were rushing a product to market before it was ready last March, but they had to keep their new stock owners happy. If you think things were frustrating as a member, you should have stopped by our offices sometime. Fingers were constantly pointed at other departments. Power struggles between authoring, multimedia, editorial and programming were the norm.. But amidst it all we managed to maintain a sense of the positive as often as we could. We had faith that the revisions and redesigns in the upgrade and the introduction of a new Teen area (which got rave reviews from the vice-president's 14-year-old daughter when she saw it, as well as right here at the Member's Organization) would be enough to turn things around. We knew that a lot of damage had been done back with the first release in March and there was a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, but Version 1.4 was going to be our chance to redeem ourselves with their customers. Not only did we hold up our end of the bargain by creating some really great content, but we did it in the midst of continuing criticism from all corners, including our own parent company. "Just wait," we confidentally thought. "They'll see." But now you won't. The discs were pressed; they just aren't mailing them out. I'M TELLING YOU, THIS THING KICKED ASS. The mail problems were fixed. The new screens were resizable. The communities were being completely redesigned. It incorporated Internet Explorer 3.0 and Shockwave. The teen section was going to be the coolest thing foisted upon American youth since MTV. But apparently CompuServe had other plans, and most of us really didn't have a clue until it was too late. If anybody cares, the company was decent enough to keep all of WOW's full-time editorial associates, who will be heading over to CompuServe to do God knows what. But after all we've been through that's a pretty thin consolation prize. It's kind of like if Michaelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and just as he was applying the last stroke, the priests decided to close the church. Now we're on our way to an even bigger house of worship, where I expect we'll find a big, fat golden calf. Pray for us, won't you?
Well, here's another letter:
Hi. I had to write--have some sort of outlet for the over- whelming disappointment
and sadness these last two days have brought. I am one of the Teen section editors for WOW.
We've worked our asses off since July--moved all of our lives from other states- to create this
vision. And believe it or not, Teen WOW was incredible. And now no one will see it. WMO(WOW! Member Organization-ed.)has
been a bright spot in our lives, because we didn't even get support from CompuServe yet we got
encouragement from you. We are this tight-knit group of creative people, working in an impossible
corporate situation, completely under-staffed and dealing with BS that you can't even imagine. Do
you know that I have the upgrade sitting in my desk? They printed the new disk. Did you know
that we worked 16 hour days to get all our content ready (over 1,000 stories) by a
September 1st deadline while the damn technical people just did their regular 9-5? They didn't
build things correctly, they didn't find the bugs, they were two months late, and now we're left with
this beautiful section just waiting to be used. When we finally got the disks they still didn't get it
right. I just am beside myself; I haven't cried this hard in a long time. H&R Block (the people who
own CompuServe) couldn't stomach this volatile business, weren't willing to give a new venture
the time required for any new business to make money. And you know what? We've been told
that it's very likely that the people who pulled the plug didn't even take a look at the new Teen
section or the upgrades. I hope that someday they look back and find out that this innovative
project (as much as it needed some help) was the wave of the future--and they screwed
themselves over royally. There are people at CSI who are thrilled we're dying--have resented us
from the beginning. They are the dinosaurs, the people who can't abide change, or anything
human-oriented. Give them business. Give them money. God, I feel sorry for their
families--heaven forbid they would have liked WOW! I'm not saying that WOW didn't have its
problems--but mostly technical ones that this new upgrade would have fixed. I am so sorry it
didn't happen. I just wish you guys could have seen it. I wish just one teenager could have read
one of my 350 stories and felt better about his/herself. That they could have escaped into a world
that made them feel at home--there isn't anywhere else in cyberspace like what we have. HAD.
So I sit here this weekend and mourn. I mourn the loss of WOW! and what it was going to
be--with all the promises they gave us from the top. And I mourn losing my fellow WOWers, my
writers and the wonderful creative environment we had. It was hard work at WOW, harder than
I've ever done, but it will be harder leaving it behind. Thank you all for supporting what you saw of
us, and having faith that what we were going to bring you was going to be better. You believed in
us when no one else, even our parent company, did. Bye..
There followed two letters from members that were relevant to Saving WOW!, but are not relevant to Bringing Back WOW!-ed
This page originally created by Andy, of the Save WOW! movement. The
creator's address is Andy7563@aol.com
-ed