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

To: Elsewhere who wrote (19663)	2/15/2000 6:59:00 PM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29970

How do you interpret today's trading toward the close? I'll tell you how I interpret it: Short squeeze. * Back to "The Standard" article: I think this discussion on the merits of the @home backbone is very interesting. I still wonder if Milo was right- in the long run it may be the single biggest differentiator between @home and everyone else. Doerr and Hearst sketched their vision, simple and elegant, on a paper place mat: Cable modems would bring Net access via the same pipes through which people get cable TV. Medin laughed them off, making him one of the few people ever to tell John Doerr he didn't get the Net. "I asked him, 'Do you know how the Internet works?'" Medin says. "The Internet is full of bottlenecks. A cable modem would be like putting a six-lane onramp onto a one-lane highway." Medin grabbed the place mat and sketched his own diagram ? a much more elaborate, extensive, private network that would speed up the content enough so it could run on Doerr's cable modems. From then on, the AtHome vision became much more complicated, and much more difficult to execute. .... Not everyone is so fond of the company. Since Medin first sketched out his design for Doerr and Hearst on that paper place mat, the Internet has matured significantly. Many ISPs now think they can offer broadband access without owning a network like AtHome's, instead leasing bandwidth from national carriers like Qwest or Level 3 (LVLT) . When its exclusive contracts end, many wonder if ExciteAtHome will be able to negotiate new contracts with such favorable terms. "A lot of cable people are saying that AtHome is a gold-plated solution," one broadband industry executive says. "They say all they want is access to a network." AtHome execs insist their network is worth its price. "Milo was right," says Eric van Miltenburg, AtHome's VP of business development and strategy. He adds that 70 percent of the content users call up comes from AtHome's private computer network. "Companies like Akamai and CacheFlow (CFLO) do exactly the same thing we've been doing but on the open Internet. They wouldn't have $5 billion valuations like they do if the model didn't work. Simply put, we've got the best broadband network." Actually Akamai has a $20 Billion** market cap. Larger than ATHM by a substantial amount. Maybe we are in the wrong business-- oe maybe its another sign how badly ATHM communicates what they really have going for them. Eric