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To: Olu Emuleomo who wrote (72152)	8/5/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: Jan Crawley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Hi guys, what are you all thinking? Amzn $100 tomorrow or today?

To: Olu Emuleomo who wrote (72152)	8/5/1999 1:37:00 PM
From: Eric Wells	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Olu - thanks for the correction - I'm not familiar with the way phone access works in the UK. Thanks, -Eric

To: Olu Emuleomo who wrote (72152)	8/5/1999 2:24:00 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Wrong Olu. Here's what happened in the UK regarding free internet access. Regulatory bodies decided that British Telecom, due to its large market share, should not make a profit on internet access calls. About a year ago, some ISP's figured they could offer dial up access without making an online charge, and recoup some of the call charges. These call charges are exactly the same that anybody accessing AOL has to pay, on top of the AOL access charge. So it is not like the customer is being charged on the back end. >>Dont be fooled. It is NOT free. AOL gets a share of the per minute access charges levied by the phone cos over there! In europe, the telephone access charges are quite steep!<< Things have now moved on and telephone companies are offering toll free numbers hand in hand with free internet access. However, if you decide to stay with AOL, not only do you have to pay the monthly charge, you continue to pay for the call charges, so its actually a lot worse for AOL users. The largest free ISP here, Freeserve, is owned by an electrical and electronic retailing chain - they don't really care about making money on the call charges - all they want is the customer base that they can flog other services to. Freeserve is about a year old, if that, and is the biggest ISP in the UK. As AOL doesn't have a backend of products that they can sell to dial up customers, their long term source of revenue is advertising. Advertising costs on the web are coming down as the number of sites increases so AOL are essentially stuffed in the UK. This scenario is spreading to Europe as we speak so they will be stuffed there too. If it happens in the US, AOL will lose their dial up revenue and will have a lot less subscribers to send ads to - and these ads will cost less per impression due to competition. The fact that Microsoft can easily undermine AOL's business shows how feeble the barriers to entry are in the internet business. AOL are not exactly going to be able to retaliate by launching a couple of operating systems and an office suite. The barriers to entry in MSFT's business are very high. Microsoft adds value whereas AOL sells a commodity. Just because it didn't used to be a commididty does not mean that AOL has some God given right to hang onto its customer base. This is why MSFT is such a solid investment and AOL isn't. AOL should no way have a PE approaching anything near the PE of MSFT.