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

To: buck who wrote (18294)	2/20/2000 8:38:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Buck, thanks for your ongoing contributions to Project Hunt. I'm interested in your conclusion that, Akamai should be an Application Gorilla, by virtue of their development of the standard, and early-mover status Being the originator of the ICAP protocol would only have primate potential if it were to remain under Akamai's control and became an open proprietary standard. This is the very issue that caused Goeff Moore to label Qualcomm incorrectly last summer, as he was under the impression that the Ericsson settlement involved ceding control of the cdma standard to an international standards group. Is "early mover status" a metric you found in the rfm, or was it borrowed from some other evaluation model? I've seen it used several times, but don't recollect encountering it in the fm. uf

To: buck who wrote (18294)	2/22/2000 5:40:00 AM
From: Dinesh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

buck Cool report. 1. You are very right about the high barriers to entry. On the switching costs front, I think it's as easy as switching the ISP. Large sites usually are designed with change in mind, particularly, changes that are not visible to the end user. 2. Akamai has crossed the chasm, and is out of the bowling alley I noticed you have classified it as an Apps Gorilla but are still reluctant to commit purchase. Any reasons for the hesitation ? 3. Do you have an estimate for the market size ? I am wondering it may not be huge, since it provides a service that's not a key component of the offer (of the website.) Let's see. Light travels 186 miles/msec. So, a server located on wrong coast will have an expected lag of about 20 ms compared to a most optimally located Akamai server. (assuming very long haul networks. else add some more delay) This is not truly a horrendous delay. So, the savings really comes down to the bandwidth costs. This puts an upper limit on what Akamai can charge for its services. 4. technology risk can there be other technologies that will obviate the need for Akamai ? Such as smarter DNS servers that resolve names better. Regards Dinesh