One of the 12 million laggards

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “When the Kids Don’t Leave The Digital Nest” about young adults who still rely on their parents to pay for their cell phone, cable, and/or internet bills.

 

“Mr. Marshall, a math and science teacher in a northern suburb of Detroit, syas he is more than willing to enable Ms. Hsu’s AOL habit. “It just feels good that you can help make it easier for them,” he says. Mr. Marshall says he pays $25 a month to allow his four adult daughters, who range from 24 to 29 years old, to surf the Internet using AOL.”

 

One of the things you learn in business school is that when you are tacking a business case, it’s important to not only make good assumptions but to state them for your audience. So I am going to make the assumption that even though AOL has broadband service plans, that Mr. Marshall is not on one of them. This is because of the price point he is at and the fact that his four daughters cannot share the broadband plan unless they all live in the same house. So we are going to operate with the assumption that this is a dialup plan.

 

I don’t know what I find more shocking, that there are still people in 2007 who pay for AOL or that Mr. Marshall has four grown daughters who are all still on narrowband. You mean to tell me that none of them are able to stick a wireless receiver into her computer and steal wireless broadband from an unguarded access point. But I shouldn’t be too shocked since, at last count, AOL still has 12 million members on a subscription of some kind. This goes to show that technology companies have to cater to customers on every portion of the innovation adoption curve.