Chuzzlewit,
Thank you for the pointer. It is more about e-commerce and the difficulty of maintaining a "franchise" on a market segment than about AOL, but it confirms my own analysis about companies like AMZN. I've been asking, what do they have that nobody can duplicate? If you go to the barnesandnoble.com website, do you see anything missing there relative to Amazon's website? Book customers can be fickle; that's presumably why Amazon is trying to be all things to all people. ISP subscribers don't switch services as often, and AOL is working to make their service more comprehensive. So AOL has something that's hard to duplicate, a 14 million subscriber base and a growing market and deals to put AOL on many desktops. Also profits, of course.
Face it, the internet stocks by and large are concept stocks. They don't have a track record of earnings and growth to point to, and we don't know much about the management. Some companies in that group will be long-term successes, and I suppose we are all looking for those companies to invest in for the long term.
Well, that was wordy and I don't know where I was headed on this, but looking at the numbers and the stories, it seemed to me that AOL was one of the more solid choices.
-musea |
