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To: Mooster who wrote (21394)	4/22/2000 1:37:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

....the Excite portal has lost customers, not gained. Something is wrong. My assertion is that the image is all wrong... I have to disagree. It has nothing to do with image. I consider myself a average user with no real loyalty. Startup If my ATHM has been turned off, the button I punch is my IE explorer. When I first set my homepage, I set it to the best news source because that is what you want to see when you first come to your computer. I use CNN. There are others. Does Excite have better access to the news than CNN? How many reporters worldwide? Finance After news, I go to yahoo to use their finance section. You can have lots of spreadsheets and everything is tied together with news reports and chat rooms on every subject. The bad thing about yahoo chat is that volume makes the small percentage of idiots stand out. The good thing is that you can find someone to talk to about even obscure stocks. I usually move on to SI or Raging Bull. There are no other contenders with volume. Eveything Else There are specialized sites on almost every subject you can imagine. If you don't know where they are ask Jeeves or do a search. The bottom line is that I can't think why anyone would go to Excite. It is not that it is a bad site. It is just a plain vanilla site that has no driving reason to bring people there. The experiment with BB stuff like the extreme search engine and Macy's "dress the walking model" were cute but not enough to hold you. I wonder how much money they spent on that? It was good for a one time 10 minute visit. The only way you can get traffic to Excite is to force people to go there and that violates the purpose of the web. Having someone stand on the corner and shout: "Go see the plain vanilla Excite portal." is wasted money. It's like trying to sell sand in the desert.

To: Mooster who wrote (21394)	4/22/2000 1:45:00 PM
From: gpowell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

I always thought those Intel adds were ridiculous, I used to have a lot of respect for intel. The founders were every engineers hero, they told shockly were to stick it, and formed their own company with VC money, and then told the VC where to stick it, and formed Intel. The fact that successful brands and successful products are correlated does not mean that branding was the causative factor for success. When two events are highly time correlated, it is natural for us to assign one of the events as the cause of the other. This is the way our brains are wired. You must resist the temptation to assign causation from correlation alone, this takes a certain amount of discipline and training, and will most likely make you dumber than most, since you will fail to believe the obvious things that everyone else takes for granted. You are saying, essentially, that for product success you must market it and create brand recognition, otherwise the product may fail. I understand what your saying, I just don't believe you.