I find it difficult to believe AOL+NSCP will fail. True, AOL is where it is today in large part due to their early presence. As the net has matured and added more reasonably sophisticated users to its community, the AOL model gave way to a splitting of its products: now we have pure portals, and pure ISPs. It made sense since this sophisticated group knew what they wanted and turned away from AOL's shrink-wrap version of the internet experience. Now consider the crowd who will join the net over the next 5 years: let's just call them "less sophisticated users". AOL is perfect for this crowd - pre-packaging all the better. The cycle is repeating and I believe you will watch AOL continue to pull ahead with competition coming from portals (XCIT,YHOO) merging with ISPs (ELNK,MSPG).
Netscape is a great brand name and the company has a great game plan. Is it the browser or the portal? Both. As the portal war matures, you'll see the battle for eyeballs being fought through introduction of new features - most portals have added free email by now, some are now providing free web pages and calendaring. Directory/Search engine components are still somewhat dysfunctional, returning hundreds, thousands and in some cases millions of hits for single word keys. The "What's Related" feature of Navigator is an interesting solution to help find what you're looking for. Look for more convergence between the browser and portal from Netscape.
I'm unfamiliar with ATHM's "start page"/portal since I live in a remote area and cannot yet benefit from the service. I'll stick my head out though and guess ATHM could benefit from partnering with a pure portal - I'd love to see YHOO step in, but it is probably too early in ATHM's life for such a deal/merge. If they grow at the expected rate, then I'll look for a merge at end of '99.
Moose |
