About 16 years ago, in the heart of the nation's breadbasket, a newspaper group started a new kind of service -- an on-line news service, or "videotex." Let's call this business "Computer-Originated Rural News" -- CORN for short.
The founders hoped to profit, eventually, from an emerging trend: the use of personal computers as information and communication resources. With the introduction of inexpensive models, computer prices had suddenly fallen within reach of the average family. Though still used mostly for games, word processing, and spreadsheets, microcomputers were also being sold with modems (external, of course).
CORN had competition - primarily CompuServe and the Dow Jones information service - but there were a few important differences. CORN was intended primarily for farmers. Its features included statewide weather conditions and forecasts, by county, several times a day, plus grain prices at selected elevators, livestock and grain futures, general and agricultural news, and articles about computers, cooking and gardening. For a monthly fee, subscribers could dial up the service on a toll-free number.
The farmers loved CORN, but the enterprise had problems. It couldn't keep offering free long-distance unless its subscriber numbers grew more quickly. Management decided to open a second office in Kansas City, where subscribers could access the service with a local phone call.
To attract an urban audience, the format was expanded to include entertainment, local news, and other more citified features. Expenses mounted: a dedicated phone line between the two offices, new computers and a server for Kansas City, frequent travel back and forth, a hip Kansas City advertising agency... Within a few months, the parent company decided its experiment had become too expensive, and the three-year-old enterprise folded.
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What made CORN go sour? Was it undercapitalized? Did the owners give up too soon? Or was CORN just too early an entrant into the marketplace?Maybe the answer lies in all those factors, but the consensus at the postmortem was that CORN lost its identity when the Kansas City office opened. Not only were the financial and personnel resources diluted, the content became murky and the marketing lost its focus. When it was aimed at farm families, CORN had a friendly down-home attitude. Forced with little warning into a slick urban environment, it became schizophrenic. The farmers were disenchanted, and the urbanites compared it unfavorably with CompuServe.
