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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (15769)	1/2/1998 1:53:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Microsoft Continues Buying Spree With Hotmail nytimes.com The good gray Times weighs in on this one. I'm still a little confused about how you get internet access without an email account, but whatever. Maybe at the library. The Hotmail service is for free to anyone with access to an Internet browser. But there is a cost: the company sells advertising that appears when Hotmail subscribers use the service, and when they check, write and send e-mail. The company said it has between 50 and 60 advertisers, but declined to specify its advertising revenue or whether it is making a profit. The company said it has 9.5 million active accounts, but its regular user base is not that high: the company said 5.5 million subscribers use the service at least once a month. That still apparently more than doubles the number of e-mail accounts that Microsoft currently controls. Microsoft declined to say how many subscribers now pay for its Internet access service, but last spring, when the company last disclosed the figures, it was serving 2.3 million members. Maybe Hotmail has really good email software, something MSN has had some, uh, hiccups with, though they seem to be doing ok lately. At least relative to AOL. "It's another 10 million prospects to sell MSN to," Howe said. "They're basically trying to buy eyeballs. That's the bottom line." A lot cheaper than WebTV eyeballs, anyway, though those WebTV eyeballs are paying customers. Who knows, maybe it's another conduit to get the "Chrysler car radio"/"Just like Disk Defrag" company lines out far and wide more quickly, though they seem to spread plenty fast already. "It's really a part of their culture," said Howe, from Forrester. "They buy technologies that they want to make an immediate impact." Well, sometimes. Other times, they buy technologies that they want to kill, except in the proper Windows World context, like those 3d-graphics things that were going to run everywhere. Will streaming audio and video follow the same path? Will the Special Master have anything to say about these matters? Stay tuned. Cheers, Dan.