Sam, you are still not reading. Where did you see that MSFT was going to pay AOL to be an "anchor tenant"? I read the AOL PR release, and even the company that gave a new meaning to hype, did not mention anything about getting money from MSFT.
Secondly, I said that MSFT thought the money was in WebTV and content, which is why they have decided to spend their money on, you guessed it, WebTV and content. They are NOT looking to MSN as their future, which is pretty obvious. As I said before, they could gather eyeballs for MSN anytime they wanted to if they thought there was money in it. AOL doesn't care if there is money in it. Their mission, made so abundantly clear by stock sales, is to keep the stock price juiced.
As for having great content, I did not say that Microsoft had great content. I said that the have decided to spend some of their cash hoard creating it. And, given that cash hoard, I do believe they have a far better shot pulling it off than AOL. As far as who has the best content right now, that is a no brainer. The Web! Of course, CNET is now going to package that for idiots who cannot find it on their own.
Finally (please!), you may not see WebTV as a winner, but when it comes to being a visionary, I would place my bets on Bill Gates ahead of Steve Case, the purveyor of an obselete, anachronistic, closed-end system dating back to the days before there was popular access to the Web. Still, what amazes me, is you apparently see no potential in the nascent WebTV, while you have no problem with the fact that AOL has not made money in all these years. |
