Tax selling- Technology Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Tax selling- Technology

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: LLCF who wrote (19)	11/25/2000 1:00:29 PM
From: GraceZ	of 30

what do you think of this thing for a bounce into next year?? Its a coin toss. The good news is that they and T have suffered so much that they have effectively no competition. They are doing poorly, but the DSL providers are doing worse. There are a few niches where wireless and pure fiber players are doing well, but no one has been able to put together a worldwide broadband ISP. And the cost of doing that now is prohibitively expensive. The question is, it worth doing? It seems that the sub fees alone are no guarantee of earnings, especially when you take into consideration that per/sub fees will only come down in the future. If and when they can figure out a way to free themselves from the MSOs and get into some income producing areas maybe we'll see earnings. Problem is the MSOs want to keep those to themselves. I see them almost as I see the airlines in a way. They'll get bigger and bigger, more and more people will use them and they'll never make much of a killing because the price's they can charge will be subject to constant deflation. OTOH they can provide to companies the one thing that is of value and that is access to a large market (the AOL syndrome). As more and more people are drawn away from broadcast mediums and onto the web the companies that wish to reach consumers will have to go where those consumers go and address them in a way that they don't find offensive. Maybe when I want to buy a Toyota I will click through to their site and view their commercial instead of being subject to twenty ads in a week for a car I have no interest in. This kind of permission type advertising is really only good in a high bandwidth cached environment. If @Home were to position itself as the one company that can provide this without the inherent problems of the pure public Internet, that and the ASP type services, then I think they could do quite well. But instead they play around by buying stupid greeting card companies to get their page views up thinking that they are still a portal and they are dependent on banner ads for income! Most of the people who use the service will never get the speed they advertise because their service shuttles everyone through slow proxy servers and they discourage people from making the registry changes necessary to make the system run at high speed. They are confused, they don't realize that speed and reliability of connection is the only thing they are selling....not some third rate portal. Most of this matters little because they will succeed regardless of the dumb mistakes management makes. The question is, are there better plays out there that will play out while we are waiting for it to become what it can be? The good news is that so many companies that are considered similar will be doing worse, so by default @Home will be considered a better place to put money if you want to invest in a pure play on broadband. AOL is no longer a pure play and the other ISPs are on a deathwatch as broadband rolls out, so in that regard we might see it come back up near term as the general market recovers and we get past tax selling. I can see it doubling barring any unforeseen bad news. That's why I suggested it here.

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next