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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fut_trade who wrote (3292)	11/29/1997 5:36:00 PM
From: ItsAllCyclical	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27307

Interesting reading found in the latest PC Magazine on all the search utilities/sites available on the net. They mention over 64 sources. Yes, yahoo won an editors choice along with HotBot (HotBot??? never heard of them...). What I found most interesting was simply the number of choices. These were some of the one's they profiled in detail: AltaVista (altavista.digital.com) Excite (excite.com) HotBot (hotbot.com) InfoSeek (infoseek.com) LookSmart (looksmart.com) Lycos (lycos.com) Northern Light (nlsearch.com) Open Text Index (index.opentext.net) PlanetSearch (planetsearch.com) Search.com (search.com) WebCrawler (webcrawler.com) Yahoo (yahoo.com) As investors we always restrict the discussion to "the big 4", lcos, xcit, seek, and yhoo since those are the only one's currently being traded. However, from the list above we can see the field is getting more and more crowded. I expect more and more of these companies to go public thereby reducing the value of the current "4". I saw the same thing happen with the y2k craze. Everybody wants to make a fast buck on the new issues and the old issues tend to stall. When Coke first started I seriously doubt people had the expectations for their market as people have with the internet. I expect more intense competition (Microsoft), especially if yahoo actually starts to make some decent money. Also interesting of the "4" lcos received no excellent ratings and one poor one in 10 categories. Excite had 2 excellent ratings, infoseek had 4 excellents, while yhoo had 7, and HotBot an unknown to me had 5. Excite, HotBot, Yahoo, and Infoseek had no poor ratings in any categories. These ratings confirmed in my mind that lcos is the weakest of the four. I still think yahoo is a good site, but would readily switch to HotBot or others if they started to charge. They will never make a dime from me directly. I'm sticking by my short based on valuation, but also I still think the rate of growth of these companies will slow as we've already started to see in the earnings. Jim