Fair comment. The signal-to-noise ratio makes rereading a fairly painful process, but I have looked at most of the relevant history.
You clearly understand the company better than pretty much anyone else on this thread. I think your comment about the market pricing this company efficiently is unworthy of an experienced investor though. So it's worth it whatever the price is ? I don't think so. This kind of analysis seems to me useful at least in seeing what kind of future assumptions are discounted in the price. I have done some calculations based on what I've culled from this thread, and may post them later.
More interesting perhaps are the two following issues which have not seen fully explored on this thread:
1. who will make the money from telephony over cable networks
2. @Work: how much of the business / web hosting pie could we get
I'll make a few comments on (1) here, and leave (2) for another post.
Telephony is interesting because it's clearly a business worth tens of billions (?) that the cable cos have been lusting after for ages. See this very old (1994), but still quite relevant interview with John Malone in Wired.
wwww.wired.com
As far as basic telephony goes, it's hard to see what would allow ATHM to capture any significant chunk of this revenue. However, if they put together a value-added phone service, this might be a compelling offer for the cable cos. I'm thinking of services such as the following:
- voicemail/answerphone service
- TV interface for an integrated email/voicemail message centre
- videophone services ??
This all kind of begs the question of how long ATHM will be able to extract rent just from connecting third party services up to their high-bandwidth architecture, before it reverts to an internet-like interconnection model. Clearly, promotion on the @Home service is a more enduring source of leverage though.
Regards, Roger.
PS: I did buy in last week, so I suppose you could count me among the 'believers'. |
