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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Islander99 who wrote (12929)	7/25/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: E. Graphs	Respond to of 29970

Speaking as an American who owns only ATHM, having dumped AOL at much higher numbers (thank goodness!!), the battle here is not AOL vs. ATHM. It is that we Americans believe in the freedom we have to create, fund, and nurture ideas for businesses that lead to profits and wealth, and we don't all want some company with a disadvantage forcing us by law to split our profits with them when the time looks most ripe for the picking. IMHO, Steve Case should learn how to negotiate like a CEO and stop asking government to force his wishes on other companies. IMHO, ATHM doesn't need partners like AOL who may stab you in the back at the first opportunity.

To: Islander99 who wrote (12929)	7/25/1999 5:59:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Wouldn't AOL love for its customers to be able to use the AOL ISP over higher speeds? Wouldn't ATHM love for AOL's marketing muscle to be pushing 18 million customers over to cable modems? I believe the answers are "no" and "no". There's little evidence that AOL is interested in giving their customers high-speed access. Despite agreements with Bell companies that serve most of the country, AOL has yet to offer (as far as I can tell) a DSL option to their customers. In the meantime, those same Bell companies (and the other two that don't have AOL agreements) offer DSL using other ISPs. For its part, ATHM doesn't seem to need the "marketing muscle" of AOL. Theirs is not a marketing problem, but rather a technical and physical problem. They don't seem to have much trouble getting more customers than they can handle, but they do face a significant problem of getting enough lines to homes and enough capacity behind those lines to handle the demand that already exists. AOL would bring to the table very little more than over-developed marketing muscle that would only exacerbate the supply problem. And consider the problems on AOL's end. Do you really think AOL's systems are ready to handle even a small number of high-speed users? Imagine what would happen if they could throw a switch and somehow give all their users "broadband" access today. I suspect it would be as great a disaster as their notorious capacity problems a few years back when they switched to unmetered time access. What kinds of changes will they have to make to handle thousands of users who are online 24 hours a day? How much more will they have to pay to WCOM (which handles the guts of the system) to pump through all that extra data to their users? The whole marketing operation (which is the only part that AOL actually runs) depends on non-internet servers in Virginia. Are those systems ready for the changes that would arise because of broadband access. Somehow, given AOL's record with things technical, I doubt it.