John,
That was a thoughtful and tempered response. The technology concerns me, too.
When AOL first went public I thought long and hard about buying a big block of shares through the IPO.
Unfortunately, I decided to "research" the product and bought the CompuServe and AOL online services for home use. The latter was so technically inferior to the former (remember the blue AOL bars?) that I decided only a fool would buy into the thing.
So I bought a lot of H&R Block, because I loved CompuServe. Well, you know the story, and I was fortunate to get out of HRB with a small loss.
That episode taught me a little about these stocks:
(1). Marketing, whether for subscribers or advertisers, is a bigger part of the equation than I would like, but it seems to be critical to a stock's prospects. If the Street does not have confidence in a company's capacity to market, the stock goes nowhere.
(2) Even bad technology can be improved. The blue bar eventually disappeared, and the new AOL release, Casablanca, will have many improvements over 3.0.
Will AOL wipe out when the new technology for audio-visual is on the net? I don't think so. These guys running the company are shrewd enough to position AOL so that it will get the necessary capacity. They seem to have fought jealously to maintain independence thus far, but I don't doubt for a minute that, if AOL really had to, it could somehow make an alliance with a deep pocket suitor which would enable it, with a huge subscriber base, to leap to the next level of the internet.
Thanks for responding in a rational tone. There are certainly some Zippo types on this board.
Regards,
LordDarley |
