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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave who wrote (64293)	1/20/2002 9:37:58 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 74651

I don't know how ISPs operate in USA, but the ISP business itself is a market with very homogeneous products. Having been a CompuServe customer once, I also know that AOL provided content and probably still does, just like MSN. But AOL won't be able to capture significant market shares in the ISP business in many countries for many years, and cannot require AOL as an ISP for Red Hat Linux. If they did that, Red Hat Linux would become a minor, unimportant Linux distribution very, very quickly. More and more internet users have fixed connections like ADSL and Cable, and moving those users to AOL requires buying telecom companies. As long as they haven't bought most European telecom companies, they are nowhere near a situation, where they could only start thinking of requiring Red Hat Linux users to use AOL. I'm pretty sure that the idea is to provide a specialized version of Red Hat Linux that improves AOL integration a lot, and all the integration features in that operating sysem will, of course, only work if you are an AOL customer. It's like integrating Passport into Windows, except that the underlying operating system is not owned by a single company. Linux is so flexible as an OS, that integration can be made much easier in Linux than in Windows. I really hope this deal goes through, because it will be extremely interesting to see the first real commerically networked OS that is not restrained by antitrust. Dybdahl.