Internet Friendly -- Spry Plans To Offer Software Program That Will Make Using This System Easier

Asmall Seattle software company may be sitting on one of the suddenly conspicuous mother lodes of the Information Age.

Spry Inc., an $8 million Pioneer Square company with 40 employees, has developed an easy-to-use interface for the Internet, a vast amalgam of networked computers sharing e-mail, bulletin boards, files and other data. Used primarily by government, academic and corporate agencies, the Internet is a crude prototype of the much-publicized data highway eventually expected to offer voice, video and interactive TV besides just text.

Together with O'Reilly & Associates, a Northern California book publisher, and Seattle neighbor NovX, which provides Internet access to corporations and businesses, Spry will early next year offer a $100 Internet-in-a-Box access shrink-wrapped retail package aimed at small businesses and individual computer users.

Spry, which specializes in computer networks, wants to make using the Internet as easy as loading a game or spreadsheet. Based on Spry's Air Navigator software, Internet-in-a-Box will offer menus, help files and a custom interface based on Microsoft's Windows, all aimed at flattening the Internet's imposing learning curve.

The conventional way to gain access to the Net, as it's called, is by logging on through a business or institutional computer, or calling a service provider's local number and registering as a client.

This direct method leaves users pretty much on their own to learn and master the system. Few resources are provided for beginners, who become frustrated with the Internet's complexity.

Because there's never been a product quite like Spry's, nobody knows the potential demand.

"We're trying to get ready for `huge,' " said Jeff Payne, technology director for NovX's InterServ, which integrates the Internet with computer networks.

Spry has been deluged with interest since announcing the program Dec. 6. Use of the Internet is exploding at the rate of 150,000 new users a month. Estimates vary from 3 million active users to as many as 30 million.

The disparity "is one way of saying, nobody really knows how many people are out there," Payne said. Still, Spry is bracing for an onrush: "I mentioned it to my dentist, and right away he's got to have the software. All of a sudden, the Internet is cool, it's in vogue, everyone wants on it."

Payne is confident the company can accommodate demand, even at the rate of hundreds of sign-ons a day. The real payoff could come in standardization on Spry as the most popular way to log on to the Internet.

"One of the things we want to accomplish is an infrastructure similar to what Novell has done with its Netware local-area-networking software and Microsoft has done with its Windows," said David Pool, president of the 6 1/2-year-old company. Microsoft and Novell make hundreds of millions annually off systems widely adopted as interface and network standards.

Becoming a Microsoft of the Internet will require some careful market considerations, however, and Spry is not sure what its purchasers will pay for its service. An initial figure of $12 an hour met with resistance from users used to paying less than that for an entire month of unlimited on-line time.

"The rate is not engraved in stone," said Bob Beals, sales manager for NovX, headquartered next to Spry off Occidental Square. "We want to see where the rate structure settles out as use ramps up." Economies of scale might enable a smaller fee as usage increases.

The fee issue is increasingly a sore point among Internet and data-highway insiders. Commercial services charge a series of fees, ranging from a flat monthly amount of $5 to $10 with limited use to hourly rates of $10 to $20 and additional document-access fees on a per-search-of-database basis. Commercial services are discovering the Internet's popularity and hope to make money by reselling its data.

But public-interest groups argue that because the network was founded and built with government money, and many of its services draw on publicly financed institutions, libraries and documents, access should be cheap or even free to taxpayers.

Beginning Jan. 1, a new California state law will require that legislative information, including bills, amendments and vote records, be made available on-line for no fee. Jim Warren, a Northern California computer-access activist who led a six-month battle to push the law through, said: "One of the biggest hassles was why should the state charge people for receiving information in machine-readable form when it had already been put in machine-readable form (by the state)."

Posting messages updating the progress of the bill, Warren used the Net itself to blitz lawmakers with faxes, letters and phone contacts. More than 70 organizations and 1,500 individuals contacted the Legislature to support the measure. "They didn't know what hit them," he said. A move in Washington state is under way to support similar legislation.

Putnam Barber, president of the Evergreen State Society, said pay-for access from commercial services is reasonable as long as public data is directly available in some other form for free - for example, by dialing directly into a state or local agency database.

Providers should be allowed to "charge whatever the customer will pay for prettying up a system," Barber said, "but only if it's available elsewhere directly. What makes me splutter is when governments allow providers to be exclusive agents."

Personal-computer users can log on to the Internet from home through a service provider or at the office on a company network. Providers gear their service to large-volume clients and charge only $10 or so a month for individuals - one of the cheapest ways to get on-line.

"Spry has a good product, but they're out for greed," said Kirk Moore, who offers a competing service at $10 a month called Hebron in Kirkland. "They're trying to recoup their investment very quickly."

Spry's and Hebron's services both provide access directly to the Internet, as opposed to "gateway" commercial services such as America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy, which transfer e-mail messages or act as bridges into the Internet.

"There may be a need for what they're (Spry is) providing," Warren said. Referring to "so much shuck and jive" on the Internet, Warren said consumers "are going to have to understand precisely what they're getting. But no matter what (Spry is) offering, $12.50 an hour sounds absolutely bizarre."

Spry has to convince the marketplace the enhanced features are worth paying more for, Beals said. "We need to do a good job of informing people."

Hebron's interface is straight text, somewhat like the aging DOS system of IBM-and-compatible computers, with menus to aid learning and navigation. Moore's philosophy: "The Internet is an environment that requires a little learning commitment from users. But once they learn the system, they're looking for the cheapest access possible."

Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, publisher of a popular "Whole Earth" Internet handbook by Ed Krol included with the Spry software, thinks cost concerns may be overblown.

"It's like asking, `How can we have telephones? Who's going to pay for all that equipment?" O'Reilly said.

As a publisher himself, O'Reilly considers fees for data to be "entirely reasonable. A fair amount of work goes into formatting data and getting it on-line. There's a lot of value a publisher adds."

Spry's fee structure will be the first true test for Internet subscribers. The market is so untested the company doesn't even have initial sell-in estimates.

"We can't anticipate because we're doing something that's never been done before," said Payne.