What I mean to say is that minitel was in an incredible position to grow and be a massive platform, worth 3 digit billions of dollars, and instead traded this potential for charging for every second.

This pushed all the random services (granted, mostly chat, and forum like things) that were cool at one point off off it, and first onto BBS'es, then the internet came with some free server space included in virtually every internet package. A lot of these were initially let on the platform, then bled dry, and died.

But minitel, without a doubt, could instead have pushed those services, and could have made it easy and cheap to host one of them, a decade before the internet arrived and it would have spread like wildfire instead of the internet, sooner, faster and with a few upgrades maybe even better. Instead, it charged by the second, made maybe 100 million euros total profit and died without any evolution at all. Because of France Telecom's business practices, everything on it was bled dry and was always losing money. And FT is a monopolist, they just bleed their services dry, and when they die, no replacement is forthcoming. At least things like Amazon have the decency to still offer the service when they destroy their supplyers. FT, however, just destroys.

And it was all for nothing. Despite forcing these charges, it has (well, had, these days) a reputation in the financial industry for being a place where sometimes interesting companies become shady, then die. All killed in the name of France Telecom's business model, and nonexistent profits, just so it could do it's charge-by-the-second thing (perhaps you can notice that I'm not a fan of telcos). Just so all the "profit" could go to France Telecom and nobody else could maintain a living on it.

Minitel is the ultimate example of France Telecom's economic sabotage : a massive monopolist that just couldn't stomach other people profiting even a bit of their platform and ending up destroying the market it had a monopoly over, all because of management incompetence, intransigence and utter indifference. It's not just that they didn't see the opportunity, as that requires looking for opportunities in the first place : they just didn't care. FT management is a reward position you get when some important politician owes you a favor, which makes it a given that high level managers are utterly incompetent, because either they are incompetent, or they're not incompetent and are aware that it's a favor : their days are numbered before they start, so they bleed the position for all it's worth and spend their time elsewhere.