Great post, Jeff. It is a privelege for us to engage in such dialogue with management. Kinda like Ted David responding to CNBC slams on the SI forum. EBAY is rumored to read posts on its SI thread, but does not respond to them directly. Wetherwell interacted with posters on its Yahoo thread in Aug 98, but by and large such dialogue is very rare and a sign to me of very enlightened self-interest on gnet's part. It certainly contributes to my confidence in your stock.
<Yahoo is probably the biggest
copy-cat organization on the Web, yet most people rave about how innovative Yahoo
is... it's not just Yahoo Finance, but also Yahoo Auctions (a complete copy of eBay),
Yahoo email, and the whole Yahoo portal is a copy-cat version of AOL... in many
respects just not as good. >
In Feb '99, I attended an investors forum featuring Steve Harmon. He essentially said the same thing. Nevertheless, I must give Yahoo credit for penetrating this market as well as they have, despite being second or less to market.
<so they built the Yahoo Finance message boards to function almost identical to
SI, except the quality of posts isn't as high over at Yahoo >
The last phrase is understatement at its most egregious <g>. The high quality of SI posts is about being first to market, and the power of Community, as I suggested in an earlier post.
Interesting point re: comparison charting. And of course the example chart you include speaks volumes as to why I am long yahoo, but longer gnet. I have no doubt the latter will far outperform the former going forward.
On Friday, I purchased 40 shares of gnet as a birthday gift for my daughter. As I've mentioned on a couple other threads, when she graduates from college in 2006, I figure she can buy a house with it :). |
