Competition....you better believe and...
straight from Silicon Valley and this one will be hard.
Hi Robert,
I tried AltaVista, here are my observations:
-The setup is as easy as HomeFreeWeb.
-You can see the phone number that it will dial and it was
a local phone number (this I like).
-The Ad banner is empty (You just see an empty rectangle), this is anoying, they can put something more entertaining, like HomeFreeWeb does.
-The Ad banner disappear as soon as you disconnect and it should be like that (HomeFreeWEB does not...I have to reboot).
-HomeFReeWeb does resize automatically my Web Browser and place the Ad banner nicely right on top of my Browser. AltaVista does not at all and its Ad banner is not well centered and is right over my Netscape Bookmarks, very bad.
I had to move the banner myself.
Conclusion: While AltaVista is overall better than HomeFreeWeb in term of reliability. It is still a not finished product (that banner). However, my big concern there is that AltaVista has the enormous staff power (brain) to solve all these little problems very quickly, also CMGI have very deep pockets and therefore can afford loosing money for a while and American investors will accept that.
Look at these two PR:
biz.yahoo.com
This one stated that service in Canada would start on December 15th.
biz.yahoo.com
While this one said that the service was available yesterday.
Well, as you saw, I tried AltaVista and it is available now, so the second PR is the right one for Canada.
Now this is clear. We have serious competitions.
I told you, I told you. Wait until the Yankees are all around us...and they are now in 85% of Canada. I don't consider that as a good news for us CY shareholders, may be it will push CY to go faster, but they still need more money to do so, Paul cannot ignore AltaVista at all.
Above all, I still consider 3WEB as a superior product, but so often in business, it is not really quality that count, it is a question of getting the market and fast, then put quality. I still don't understand why CY took so long for TO and AltaVista can do it in a snap all across Canada. Well...sometime money help.
A not so happy shareholder.
JMHO,
Best Regards,
claud_c |
