Volume 16, Number 6 • June 1999

Ambush
Many moons ago in another life, a supervisor of mine uttered these words of managerial wisdom, “Bosses don’t like surprises.” Even happy surprises can draw a furrowed brow. For example, a manager who finds that her staff has completed a new project early may be glad that it’s completed, but worry whether the sense of surprise could indicate consistent low estimates and under-assignment of staff energies. But most surprises are not happy ones, it seems.

Last year the searcher community went ballistic over the sudden launch of Dialog’s DialUnit pricing. The initial rules implementing the new pricing measures added, on average, one-third to the price of most searches. Fending off the furor of negative reactions, Dialog realigned the pricing policies to a generally revenue-neutral base. In fact, some analyses indicated a small drop in average search costs. Probably as much negative reaction stemmed from the surprise and confusion of the sudden switch. Even Dialog staff could not explain the algorithm changes at first. Without advance warning from an alert, Net-savvy online trade press and from listservs, most searchers would have found out about the new pricing policy the morning it went into effect; many did anyway.

Though a colorful example of negative surprises, the DialUnit controversy is certainly not the only example of such practices. In fact, leaping out of bushes at unsuspecting customers remains a regular practice for many traditional information industry vendors when it comes to renewing subscription or licensing contracts. Vendors offer institutions attractive, low-ball pricing for the first year of their enterprise-wide contract leases. Then, throughout the year, they silently tally up the “actual costs” of searching. New enterprise end-user searchers usually lack much systems training and never even hear the meter ticking under prepaid subscription access.

The tally uses the old per-usage pricing set for a market comprising experienced, efficient professional searchers. Then, when renewal time comes round and end users have grown fond of or even addicted to full access, the real price tag for unfettered online searching appears as a price quote for renewal.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Most information professionals have learned from their own experience or the shared experience of others to watch out for this practice. They will insist on getting regular postings of those “actual costs,” require vendors to pre-define their renewal pricing policies, or demand multi-year contracts that maintain low costs. So, the practice no longer poses the same danger or the same opportunity now that customers have wised up.

In the long run, however, the real danger threatens vendors who have lost the trust of their customers. Customers can do a lot of grousing about a vendor and still trust them.

They can argue vigorously about prices and value and still believe that the vendor is friendly. But when the day comes that customers no longer believe that a vendor is “an honest broker,” when customers think that only constant vigilance will keep a vendor from picking their pockets, that’s a sad day for the vendor. Setting aside the sentimental rejection and looking at the situation from a hardheaded practical view, busy information professionals just do not have the time to devote to constant vigilance over vendors they consider unreliable or untrustworthy. Life’s too short, and vendors who ambush customers may find their revenues coming up even shorter.

Most important, getting ambushed by vendors you have trusted can make information professionals look like fools to their bosses. (“What’s this budget increase for? You mean that new stuff we put on the intranet is going to cost this much more next year? Why the heck didn’t you tell me last year before we installed it? I thought you said this vendor was a good guy.”) The more conspiratorial, X-Files viewers among the information professional community might even suspect that ambush vendors had set them up, hoping that companies would transfer money out of the hands of knowledgeable, value-conscious librarians and into those of harried, inexperienced MIS managers. However, I do not share such a view. Long-term malevolence requires a discipline and foresight rarely demonstrated by the rather myopic and impulsive traditional information industry. Nonetheless, the destruction of trust from ambush practices remains a threat to both sides.
 

A Glass, a Cow, and a Dairy
This column and this author have long complained about inflexible pricing policies that prevent customers from defining the size and quantity of the information they want to buy, which, by the way, inhibits vendor sales. For years, customers could not get the information industry to offer bulk pricing for online. (And they wondered why end-user searching never took off!) Of course, certain high-volume clients worked out private arrangements, but most users still had to buy online, search by search. Then along came CD-ROMs, which offered to sell online at volume rates. Now information professionals could access their high-use files for a predictable, budgeted figure that would last for a year. Nor did increased usage change the price. (Enter the end user.) The new pricing practice extended to tape licensing and Web-based access. Suddenly, every vendor wanted subscription, flat-rate contracts—particularly vendors looking for predictable revenues.

All of a sudden, usage-based pricing fell out of favor. You had to buy the whole cow to get a glass of milk, an annual subscription to a database to get occasional records. To compound the problem, most CD-ROM or tape licenses included contract clauses that forbade re-distribution outside the institution’s walls, unlike print materials. Academic libraries that might have reproduced and mailed an article through interlibrary loan or faxed a reference listing to colleagues in other libraries could not open up online access to anyone but faculty or students. The result? Only subscribers could access the data. Outsiders, even those with money in hand, could not gain access.

Now the problem has gotten even worse. Major publishers with large Web sites containing collections of all their journals have begun requiring libraries to subscribe to the whole collection. One academic librarian involved in extended negotiations with scholarly publishers considered it the norm, citing Academic Press’ IDEAL and the American Chemical Society’s Web editions as just two examples. So now the thirsty must buy not only one or two cows, but a whole dairy herd.

Academic librarians take a certain pride in their ability to identify the needs and desires of their clients and to meet them with carefully selected content presented in an effective format and acquired at a good price. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years buying access to dozens or hundreds of titles they don’t want but have to take because of a publisher’s marketing policy will frustrate and anger librarians. It can also make the librarians look weak and ineffectual to their managers. All they have to do is turn around for their managers to read the “kick me” signs on their backs.

That vulnerability may not last, however, and when it goes, vendors had better watch out. One very wise and very dangerous head librarian told me that the lessons she had learned in the streets of Detroit had served her better in dealing with publishers than any lessons she ever learned in library school. This model revolutionary lectures other librarians on how to bring scholarly publishers to heel. If publishers want war, she’ll give it to them.

But is it war you really want, dear vendors?
 

Gone, but Not Forgotten
The dumbest thing we information professionals have ever done in the last 2 decades of dealing with electronic sources was agreeing to that insane clause inaugurated in the licensing contracts for CD-ROMs, the one that said that failure to renew “the license” meant that we had to return the entire set. I can still remember my shock when I first heard about that stinker.

Over the last few years, one leading business library paid over a half-million dollars for access to Laser Disclosure. When they decided to cancel their subscription, Disclosure (now Primark Financial Information Division) took the entire collection back. This is not right. Information vendors should follow the model of JSTOR, the consortium of digital scholarly publications. They should include perpetual access clauses. The day that a customer cancels a source, they no longer get updates, but they can still access the material for which they have already paid. Vendors may charge a reasonable fee for maintaining electronic access to that material, but nothing like the full-price subscription.

This now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t policy is the rankest injustice imaginable. First of all, the prices charged are not “licensing” or “rental” fees; they are purchasing prices. Avis and Hertz want their cars back when the rental license runs out, but they don’t charge the price of the car for a weekend of rides! Most CD-ROMs, tape licenses, and now Web access licenses charge the same price as for a full print publication—if you’re lucky. Many charge even more! If vendors didn’t have the right to take the print back, the fact that electronic formats allow something to fit in an envelope or a simple programming command to block access should still not change the relationship.

Remember the wisdom of Henry Kissinger: “Let me make you a deal you’ll want to keep.” Did we sign the agreements? Yes, we did. Should we have? Never. OK, you got us—now let us go. No deal that imperils the survival of one party is a good deal for either party.
 
 

Barbara Quint is editor in chief of Information Today, Inc.’s Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals and a longtime online searcher. Her e-mail address is bquint@mindspring.com.

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