Folks, I haven't witnessed as much chest thumbing and generally aggressive display since our village's auditions for a repertory production of "King Kong." My mouse finger is getting numb from reading all the know-it-alls. Can we please chill?
Here is my opinion: the Web is putting Moore's law to shame. It is growing parabolically in weeks, kids, and it is worldwide. It is a business-to-business and consumer phenom. And we are only on the cusp of the shift to networks. It will involve not only commerce and advertising but your appliances. It's going to change going to school and shopping. Plus the technology is evolving at hyperspeed. And on top of it all, computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, and Windows 98 is coming out this summer. How do you think Microsoft is going to promote it? My guess is as a vehicle for getting on the Web.
I see no point in arguing valuation. Shorts like jeremiads; longs like nitrous oxide. As for tomorrow, I have no idea. Of course high expectations are built into Excite's numbers. But sheesh, Excite is delivering over 200% growth, with confirmed contracts for the coming quarter in the tens of millions, or so I read. In fact, Excite beat the consensus by 7 cents, which is better than Yahoo did (the call on Yahoo was 4 cents; Yahoo brought in 8 cents). Is this really an occasion for rehashing the "but they're losing money" argument, to say nothing of the eternal tulips? Yipes, if I only had a share of SEEK for every time I've heard that--about DELL! This is how the market works. We are in a bull market, and the Internet is going to drive enormous growth in the entire economy. What do you expect, a price like that of GM?
The big money isn't betting on tomorrow; it sees what's coming up, and the engines are in the middle of it all. I hate to sound messianic about this, but seems to me we're not quite ready to implode. I hope if I'm right it won't be too terrible a disappointment for the gleeful shorts, who are perhaps even more obnoxious than gleeful longs bragging about entry and exit points and how much they've made, since the shorts are trying to frighten people. You get the feeling they enjoy being right (even when the world hasn't realized it yet!) and other people's misery perhaps a little more than is healthy. Or is that a matter of taste? So be it. Sorry if I've offended. |
