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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Vendit™ who wrote (24834)	7/4/1999 11:52:00 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 41369

i just got the emachines computer and have it up and running on compuserve. i got a intel 400 chip inside for an extra $100 bucks. I like AOL,s aggressiveness but it worries me that if a giant marketing push were undertaken by giant companies like ATT/MSFT to provide FREE service that AOL might lose its membership base-and fast. Why would anyone pay 22 a month as I am now doing if a comparable service were free? Of course, this presumes it could be profitable, the free service. Here I am using an essentially free computer comparable to what Dell sold for over $1200 a year ago. Who is to say this could not happen to internet services, just as AOL gives you a computer to get your on line business as a subscriber, could not an even more aggressive internet service provide give you the service free to get income from advertisersa and possibly your e-business (and thiers)? I worried about Dell continually, thinking the threat to them was a "dumb" low priced box widely used at the corpoarate level, taking away their profits, no matter how efficiently they built to order. Could not AOL's membership revenues go this way, become an unnecessary expense. This Is certainly not what I want, being an AOL shareholder, of course, and yet... jhg

To: Vendit™ who wrote (24834)	7/5/1999 5:28:00 AM
From: John Walliker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

Vendit, OT I think....AOL has most of the ISP cusomers. The UK also has free health care......and 70% taxation of wages. They also tax local phone usage per minute........their Internet penetration per household is only about 10% where as in the USA it is about 40%......and mostly paying customers by choice. I don't know where you get these numbers from. The highest rate of income tax is 40%, but most people pay less than 20% overall taking into account the various thresholds for differing tax rates. On top of this there is "national insurance" at 12.2% on part of the salary above a threshold. Most goods are taxed (VAT) at 17.5%, although it is much more for some items like petrol (gas) where about 85% of the cost is tax. Back on topic ... Freeserve is not the only UK threat to AOL. Many other companies offer free internet access for the cost of a local phone call. I am using the BT free service with ISDN connection at 64kbit/s. The cost of the local call is further discounted by nearly 40% through various discounts that can be combined for preferred numbers. The service is almost never busy and when it has been, I have always connected on the first retry. John