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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (13047)	12/20/1999 1:14:00 AM
From: Dinesh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Mike Thanks for the explanation. I will try relate to this from what I know about WWW. Basically, it depends. The first generation websites were just static links. Yahoo emerged as The Directory and built on it. In today's marketplace, this will be an absolute failure. The next generation was a quasi-static page. The page was updated in the background periodically, giving the user the perception of a dynamic site. There are millions of sites like that today, but no name sticks out. These are not the portals. Then we got the personalized sites. These are dynamically generated. In effect we have millions of versions of Yahoo or GO or what have you. A ground floor requirement for launching/running a large portal today. A variant of the Personalized site is the 1-2-1 tailored, where each page is based not only on what the user has indicated in his/her preferences, but also on what the user has gone through in the past. Like the printer to paper to cartridge case. This is immensely successful in the commerce world. (Todays 1-2-1 is relatively simpler. Behavior prediction is still in a very early phase. This is when you seam together a character out of the user's clickstream over minutes, hours, days, weeks. There is a lot of secrecy involved in these things - for market advantage as well as privacy-fears backlash.) But they all are do-able. It requires a great deal of technological sophistication. But we are not looking for thousands of such sites. Only a few dozen at best. However, since it has happened, it must have been possible. No reason why the model cannot be deployed in the TV world. It's just bits, and picture that you see on the screen is just another representation. A hard disk may store the bits, a printer may print it, a TV may show it. These are not important for the technology associated with the control bits. The knowledge around manipulating the control bits on a super-large scale is transferable. Perhaps Gemstar can co-exist, or even thrive in this environment. I don't know enough. But the raw IPG looks like Yahoo! in 1995 and 1996. We know how Yahoo! has fared since then. Speaking in favor of Gemstar, the knowledge can be acquired. From what I have learnt third-hand, some companies (AT&T, IBM) have a bunch of patents on clicking a moving image on the tube. Like, that jacket! This can be very interesting thing. I'd love to hear more about this stuff. -Dinesh