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

To: Bill Holtzman who wrote (29662)	9/17/1999 7:06:00 AM
From: Teflon	Respond to of 74651

*Leading Net sites team on auctions to catch eBay * By Kurt Oeler and Jeff Pelline Staff Writers, CNET News.com September 16, 1999, 11:00 p.m. PT Microsoft, Dell Computer, Lycos, Excite@Home, and other leading high-tech companies will join together in a group of almost 100 Web sites offering a combined auction service intended to tackle market-leading eBay. The companies will share auction listings so that an item listed on one site can be found throughout the network, according to people familiar with the plans. The auction network is to be announced tomorrow. Woburn, Massachusetts-based Fairmarket will be responsible for managing the new network, which will mark Microsoft's first venture into online auctions. Fairmarket already conducts auctions for Lycos and Dell. The move is an overt attempt to catch up to giant eBay, one source said. The "sheer size of [Fairmarket's] database" provides formidable competition in the fast-growing auction market, the source said. Internet auctions have become wildly popular, attracting users looking for practically every kind of saleable item. EBay, which claims to offer some 3,086,175 items in 1,628 categories, is well ahead of the field. Member sites will continue offering auctions in their own format, meaning users won't know where any given item is originally listed, one source said. Some sites will offer free auction services, whereas eBay charges listing fees. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Excite@Home, and Ticketmaster-City Search--another network member--all will take an undisclosed equity stake in Fairmarket, the source said. Last month, eBay struck an alliance with online giant America Online, agreeing to give AOL's 18 million members access to eBay's auction site in a familiar AOL format. The move was undertaken in response to increasing competition from Yahoo and Amazon, among the many to have added auctions of late. Now it appears eBay's rivals have struck back, combining to reach the kind of scale only eBay previously could offer. Auction sites are considered more desirable if more goods are available, since the greater variety is more attractive to users. Companies favor auctions because the interactivity tends to keep users coming back to see how their bids are doing, and because users tend to stay at the site longer. In Nielsen/NetRatings home-use figures released for the week from September 6 to September 12, eBay logged in as the 11th-most visited Web site, but with a leading average user time of 60 minutes, almost double its closest rival. Teflon