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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (18932)	1/17/2000 1:12:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

You have yourself believing in the "broadband revolution". The @Home service is good, but it isn't that good. You would cool this enthusiasm if you had the service. In fact, it doesn't actually add value. It adds to ease of use. No one would argue against the view that the future is high speed access. There isn't much profit in it though. Electric service is critical, but isn't profitable. The beneficiaries of the infrastructure don't have to be invested in the infrastructure.

To: E. Davies who wrote (18932)	1/17/2000 2:09:00 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Just did- it was a spectacular investment, they just got too far ahead of themselves because of the hype level. Yes, and my sister has a friend that made 5 million trading IOM during that hype. Anyone that bought in the middle of '96 and the end of '97 got left holding the bag when it became obvious that what they were selling was a commodity in deflationary freefall. And how is this different from selling high speed Internet access?

To: E. Davies who wrote (18932)	1/17/2000 2:29:00 PM
From: gpowell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Surfing the net at faster speeds and having an always on connection are great benefits of the ATHM service - but it's difficult to find other compelling reasons for having a cable modem connection. Indeed, for dedicated net users no other reason is necessary. This fact alone will guarantee ATHM a future in BB - as long as they stay independent. The question, for us is, is this a good investment? Considering only the ISP function of ATHM in the following: With dialup, there is a certain amount of time investment one must make before going on line. Therefore, many things that a BB user might do - for instance, check the weather forecast, or movie listings - a dial up users would not do. This makes the service compelling, but in an environment of open access is this worth choosing one ISP over another? I don't think so, therefore, without other compelling reasons to choose ATHM as your ISP, margins will shrink. If you compare the ATHM site with Yahoo's, or AOL's there is little to distinguish them. They all offer the same basic content. Therefore, the choice of frequented site comes down to which interface one is most comfortable with or which interface has been customized to one's taste to a sufficient extent that they wouldn't want to switch to another. I see ATHM's BB site as the key to their future success after open access - and much of that success will be predicated upon the usefulness and customizability of the interface. There is however another realm of BB and that is the set top box. Where is ATHM in this landscape? TJ's comments from last week imply that he sees this as the future of BB - but he didn't define ATHM's address in this landscape. But it appears to be their next generation product: corp.excite.com