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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: levy who wrote (11608)	8/27/1999 2:54:00 PM
From: levy	Respond to of 28311

Dennis threatens Levy brought to you by weather.com weather.com do the loop thing at the bottom its cool

To: levy who wrote (11608)	8/27/1999 4:08:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28311

I think I have made a good case for gnet to do what Alta Vista is doing and I haven't heard anyone here yet give a good argument against it. Then allow me to expand on the argument against it. The most important issue is this: The ISP business is a significantly different business than the web media and e-commerce business. It requires a new set of skills in the business that tackles it. Consider some of the recent GNET purchases and how they fit into the existing businesses and enhance each other. -- IQC charts were quickly incorporated into the SI site creating an extra audience for both. Since IQC's realtime client is done in Java, GNET also got a group of Java programmers who can add to the Java-centric skillset already there. -- Haggle online gives the company entree into a new and currently popular form of e-commerce. It provides several probably tie-ins with businesses that use the hosting services of HyperMart. In each case and many others, the new purchase served to expand the breadth and depth of GNET's web presence, driving those MediaMetrix numbers higher, and bringing experienced staff to the company who would quickly be able to help with other aspects of the services. Adding an ISP business to the mix offers few of those integration possibilities. Customer service must be expanded to handle connection issues. Because the most serious problems are experienced by those who cannot get connected, it must be a phone-based customer service operation. Business expertise must be expanded to handle telecom interconnections issues. Technical expertise must be significantly expanded to model network demand at the other end of things from where web site operators are concerned with network performance. Finally there's the question of benefit. One can see how adding a site like Dogpile with its x-thousand hits per month affects the ratings numbers that are important to GNET's core business. But how long would it take before an ISP would have a similar benefit? Even if the supposed ISP followed the AltaVista model of forcing its users to accept a proprietary interface, each hit would be generated only at very high cost to the ISP. Is it worth it?