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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bipin Prasad who wrote (8676)	1/22/1998 2:26:00 PM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10836

Unless European internet environment has been changed by now, until last year it used to be really expensive to be online from Europe. What do you mean, expensive for users to access the Internet, or expensive for companies to put a server on-line? For users, the price has been varied, depending on where they live. There is (so far) no flat rate for unlimited local calls like some cities in the U.S. - you have to pay for every minute of dial-up access. If AOL, or CIS, or your Internet access provider has a number in the local area, you can surf the net for many hours per month without going bankrupt, but you still want to make good use of your connect time and not leave the system idling. Most services break the connection automatically after 15 minutes if there is no input, and the rate at which nodes are being added has increased dramatically, the number of users apparently having reached critical mass. The rates for all calls, local and long-distance, were about 3x higher than in the U.S. 10 years ago, but have been slowly coming into line and are now comparable. As of now (1/1/98) the telecom market has been deregulated in Europe, even more so than in the U.S. so I expect even more price drops. At the moment, there are still big discrepancies in some specialized segments. The cellular phone monthly fee in Switzerland (SwissCom) for roaming (using the phone in neighboring countries) is about 10x higher than in Finnland, for example. This will have to change very soon. I don't see any customers getting entire products via download anywhere any time soon considering the size of the development tools and the documentation. Who wants to download a whole CD-ROM's worth of stuff? And you'd be guaranteed to go crazy trying. Many times I try to get a 14 MB file via FTP only to see the connection stall at 13 MB due to traffic overload on the Internet, and then see the communications software abort the transfer on a time-out. The protocols are so primitive that you can't restart where you left off. You'd think Netscape would have addressed this by now, but they haven't. I've got ISDN by the way - doesn't help. Only CompuServe can pick up a broken transfer as far as I know. My previous comments on distributors is directed at some having captive customers for no good reason (and milking them), not at the distribution method per se. I don't care where I get a Borland product or from whom as long as I don't have to pay significantly more than other customers somewhere else. According to the press release, Frontline Now is only for the U.S., the old European channel will remain. How this dovetails with the new "Partner" categories I don't know. But IMO both "Partners" and distributors in U.S. or Europe should not be granted any exclusive rights to any markets, period. Too bad for the spoiled European distributors if they don't like it. I've actually daydreamed about filing suit in the internationl court for restraint of trade.

To: Bipin Prasad who wrote (8676)	1/22/1998 4:28:00 PM
From: Jeroen Pluimers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

Bipin and partner, Being on-ling in Europe is still expensive. It's not the internet environment, but the monopolistic position of most telecom companies. Right now I have a 64k dial-up connection permanent on-line. It costs me $50 per month to the ISP and $700 per month for the telecom. However, it is changing because of two reasons: Europe is trying hard to become not only a monetary union (one currency for all of Europe), but also a market union that allows for much more competition in the market. The first steps have already been taken: most countries now have multiple mobile phone providers and multiple leased line providers (for capacities >= 2 megabit). Large players that enter this market are typically cable-TV, electricity and railway companies. There are plans for competition in the local loop as well (right now it costs about $1/hour). Getting back to Borland - these prices are one of the reasons that Borland has the internet site only in the USA. But I hope we can persuade them getting a mirror over here in Europe (IMHO Amsterdam and London are the best peering points - I'd be happy to help sorting out that kind of stuff). That would certainly improve the connections since right now it often is hopeless between 14:00 and 04:00. jeroen