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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Stept who wrote (27942)	8/5/1999 5:26:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 74651

I don't agree with your branding arguement for ISP service. It is a connection service and home portal experience. Month-to-month. $20 a month. Trust does not figure... it is an apples to apples comparision. Aren't you suspicious when someone you've never heard of sends you an email or snailmail offering you a valuable service for "free"? Doesn't everyone hear warnings about "Internet Fraud" all the time? A big name that everyone's heard of, like America Online or Microsoft, relieves worries. Please tell me what AOL has on their "portal" that you can't find or approximate for free elsewhere. The only thing they do is group the stuff together. Besides, if it's really that orgasmic of an experience to use AOL they have a "bring your own access" (or something like that) plan for 10 bucks per month. Oh, and I noticed that they actually charge $22 bucks per month for their service. If you believe that people will make an "apples-to-apples comparison" then MSN offering a similar product for either free or half-price should scare the shit out of you. Free ISPs will only steal business from those ISPs that are not offering an AOL experience. As far as the proprietary IE errors... why bring it up? There are probably a lot of things wrong with AOL... and there have been for a long time... and they continue to grow. That's a pretty short-sighted way to look at problems, especially if you're trying to promote "the AOL experience". IMHO, I think AOL is trying to make it intentionally more difficult to use non-AOL sites and that's why they don't fix it. Good luck with your AOL.