Unless the the phone, cable and who ever else wants to get into this Internet game offer more than 10 hours a month free I dont think the
established "Mom and Pop" ISP's will go under, the smaller start ups probably will. The use of the term Mom & Pop is a bit misleading, the established ISP's will give the most competition. Basically thats what you get now , 10 hours free, considering I am here more over 50 hours a month that wont work for me plus I get 10 megs of space for a web page. But the real issue is , what is AOL worth, not if they will remain in business, they will. I have a hard time thinking anything positive about a stock that sells at over 100 times earnings, uses aggressive income and expense recognition methods to boost the bottom line , has real lousy internet access, and then charges way to much for it all , O yea dont forget all that completion :-]
Great idea if they lower the monthly costs and hourly charges to keep subscribers and maybe get a few new ones, but it will eat up their bottom line , and we all know what will happen to those buy recommendations :-}. But even so , they still have that lousy AOL front end you have to go through, its so damm slow.
As for the Merrill Lynch Analysts, I will find, out tomorrow who was the lead underwriter in AOL's last stock offering, could it have been Merrill.
Mark |
