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

To: KailuaBoy who wrote (29392)	11/8/2001 7:31:04 PM
From: gpowell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Only board members without a conflict of interest voted on the amendment. Because a change of ownership could prove a detriment to shareholders. It affects the business. You’re not entitled to compensation. It was simply a stock swap, which resulted in greater control for AT&T. Why should changing the ownership structure increase ATHM management effectiveness? The statement was hypothetical. Nevertheless, I believe this to be true. Shouldn't ATHM board members be acting in the best interest of ATHM? Yes. They have a duty to do so. However, people make mistakes. Ahhaha once said “the market is an exercise in continuing error”, I believe business is a similar exercise. As you recall, Hindery was opposed to ATHM’s media strategy from the beginning, but TJ persuaded Armstrong to continue to go down this path. Mostly ATHM failed due to TJ’s vision and Bell’s ineptitude. Were they acting in ATHM’s best interest – I’m sure they thought so. If each MSO represented on the board was acting to the detriment of ATHM and exchanging voting shares so that only one MSO would have a majority of the voting shares, wouldn't that mean that the MSO with all the voting shares would be open to using that majority to benefit them instead of ATHM? I’m not sure what your saying here. Is there something sinister in the exchange of voting shares that benefited them all? Clearly, Cox and Comcast recognized short-term benefits from AT&T. I don’t see that AT&T gained anything, in fact they lost billions. For instance, sending someone to be "temporary CEO", that person spending ATHM into bankruptcy without regard to the stated financial picture just outlined by the CFO, and then the temporary employee leaving to go back to AT&T only to act as the lead negotiator in buying ATHM's network because they need cash all of the sudden? That doesn't bother you? The exchange of ownership occurred before the company was in trouble. So ATHM’s demise and the mere fact of a change in ownership are not directly related. Further, had the media market not plunged ATHM would still be in business. Therefore, the only objective conclusion is that ATHM went bankrupt for a multitude of macro and microeconomic reasons. All fairly well documented on the thread. I seem to remember that the spending spree started earlier and never stopped, beginning with Excite and ending only when George couldn't convince anyone to let him blow another $125 million on Pogo.com. To a certain degree that is true, however the company’s stated goal was focused upon profitably until April 19 2000. After which the goal was growth and establishing brand for excite. In one quarter, Q1 to Q2 2000, operating profit margin went from –5.72% to –35.96%. In hindsight, it was this quarter that set up the company for failure, as this period also coincided with widespread service outages and the well documented e-mail problems. Do you think that ATHM management would have been fiscally responsible if it were not for the exclusivity agreements? Yes. I'll stick by my earlier statement that "It's the ownership mixed with Silicon Quiche management that killed the cat". Are we in violent agreement or do you disagree with either half of that statement? I blame management, not AT&T or the other MSO’s.

To: KailuaBoy who wrote (29392)	11/8/2001 7:49:01 PM
From: FR1	Respond to of 29970

"It's the ownership mixed with Silicon Quiche management that killed the cat". IMHO, ATHM started as a idea to deliver high speed internet over cable. In order to do it, they had to give the cable operators large ownership positions because they were monopolies, the government controlled their profit, and none of them were really all that interested in spending money on the idea. So you then had a general partnership of people only half heartly interested in the business and almost never got together to make business plans. So they hired TJ, who had just bankrupted one of the best businesses in the valley, and put him in charge of sitting around. TJ was playing with monopoly money and running around like a hollywood star. I have met people that went to some of the company parties they had and the expense was enormous. TJ became thrilled about the idea that eyeballs=$$ and bought excite for a king's ransom. This bought in CEO Bell who had absolutely no techinal background whatsoever. During this time T bought into the deal by buying TCI for a zillion dollars. I think T really did feel they could make it work. They quickly realized that the first thing you had to do was buy out the other partners so you could create a corporate structure. They did this with great expense. Unfortunately, during this time the FED (none of whom has any business experience - ie none have ever run large company) decided it was a good time to kill the economy (which will go down in history as one of the biggest economic blunders of our life) and so the FED created a tight money policy that made it almost impossible to continue any telcom projects and bankrupted many of those in the middle of projects. What is happening right now is that Comcast earlier expressed interest in buying ATHM. However, T wants to get as much out of this deal as they can. So T is allowing ATHM to go BK, offering to buy it for pennies, and telling Comcast if they be quiet T will share the proceeds with Comcast (you can buy or be part of ATT broadband).