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

To: MeDroogies who wrote (25762)	7/29/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213186

If there were two auto makers in the world who had 99% of the market would that be a monopoly? If GM, AMC and Ford were the only auto companies during the 1970s, we would be driving Pinto, Gremlin like cars. Imagine this: a nice hot day on an LA freeway driving a 1999 Pinto...paradise for tow truck operators. If the cars they built, suddenly stopped on the freeway once or twice a day would you give them credit for a job well done? Paradise for Bill. Maybe I am AOL biased from the days when an AOL installation TRASHED my Netscape browser etc. They've done some rotten stuff which leads me to believe that they have no moral qualms when it comes to money. I am worried too, I wish we had more choices, I don't like to see big fish swallow little fish. Makes for less fish. Think of the ultimate end to this... even if it is 500 companies world wide, most of those companies will dwarf contries. What if it ends up that 10 companies control 90% of the commerce world wide. Scary... I like underdogs. I like Apple, they still make a better product. But the larger and more distant they get, the less they compete, and the more they integrate and emulate. The more these big companies look alike. Remember Apple swallowing PComputing? Similar to Quark swallowing mTropolis. Hopefully this won't happen to Netscape. But what if Netscape 5 comes complete with an extra 2"x10" window at the top with 'special' AOL advertising. What if they make it so that every time you click to another URL there is a commercial break you must click through to get to the next page? I may switch to another browser, one of the smaller ones, but I fear that the two giants will either buy the smaller companies or, with their ability to operate divisions at a loss, establish standards that the smaller companies cannot afford to develop around. Apple has always done less of this, and Apple still seems to be an innovator but I see a gradual slide into the status quo. These large businesses don't want to compete on quality of product, of course, they want to position themselves and leverage their assets and compete using financial tactics. AOL is the King of positioning. They're not huge because of quality, they are huge because they operated at a loss for multiyears. Probably put thousands of otherwise good, hardworking ISPs out of business. Not good for the consumer.