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

To: Ron Dior who wrote (19222)	1/24/2000 1:20:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Ron, you cite the concerns about whether this stock's price will ever rise. This may happen in any event, and regardless of what I say below. I am not prescient in these matters, no surprise. Bu I do believe that a more certain path to those goals would be through some deliberate realizations on their part, and actions to follow, which, granted, turn out to be no easy tasks. I believe that in order for this to happen they must first "rise" above the rest of the field, even beyond that which they currently have, in an industry which is now characterized by mediocrity and the abandonment of any further expectations with respect to what is achievable using emerging optical technologies. An industry which is satisfied with HFC and the prospects of maintaining a minimalist set of expectations from subscribers. I suspect that there is a growing faction within home who consider themselves the unwanting recipients of old technology and are being forced to accept it wholesale, while becoming type cast with the often-passionless expectations of their current superiors, the cable operators. They are fulfilling, effectively, the good intentions and visions of the Late Eighties and Early Nineties. But life moves on. They are the stragglers, the johnny-come-latelies in the cable industry who must agree to sleep on the couch if they want to stay overnight, in effect, to an architecture which never even envisaged the present resource demands of the web. Nor does this industry take seriously the supply of solutions which exist today to meet these still nascent demands (due to a classic example of catch-22 dynamics) of residential broadband Internet access. Home doesn't belong on analog facilities. They shouldn't be sharing the anomalies and pitfalls of another era. Analog Television may well be entrenched due to form factors, backwards compatibility requirements, you know how that goes, but Internet access demands do not share these attributes. Yet, they are forced to cohabit and be constrained by them. Home needs to break away on their own, soon. They are the best-equipped company, like no other right now, to address the architectural dictates of a geographically broad based residential broadband future, based on a photonic platform. They need to spin off, raise their own capital from a series of offerings, become more facilities-based where it makes sense, all the while cultivating a fresh look at what is achievable over real broadband pipes taking advantage of optical economies... as opposed to being doled out mere pitances of spectrum by the cartel, for fear of losing sit-com advertising revenues. They need to go after this new vision, and do it with a vengeance. But home is still captive and prevented from doing these things, in many ways.