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Technology Stocks : VeriSign (VRSN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alec Epting who wrote (12)	2/2/1998 5:52:00 PM
From: fred woodall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1285

Three million-share IPO priced Fri. at $14. Today: Volume 2.5 mil. trading as high as 37.25. I haven't noticed may large blocks jumping in today. The fun may come to a end sooner than expected is my guess.

To: Alec Epting who wrote (12)	2/2/1998 5:59:00 PM
From: Sowbug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1285

Far be it from me to predict what an IPO will do, but judging only from your description of DoubleClick I would say it's closer to Real Networks than Netscape, meaning I'd avoid it. I guess this is how I think about it: To have commerce on the Internet, you must have a secure medium. NSCP is the medium (secure socket layer servers), and VRSN further strengthens the security. Just to pick out an example for illustration, I don't know about the performance of that company called CyberCash, but I would expect that it had a really brief runup and then plummeted. I'd expect that because it SEEMS to fit into the "secure medium" group, but it's actually more like a pretender, offering a gadget that people might or might not accept. But take Netscape or VRSN. They're the foundation on which something like CyberCash would run, and they'll succeed (in theory, of course) because they don't care whether CyberCash or its replacement succeeds -- either way they make money. DoubleClick is in an even higher layer. I disagree that Web advertising is a necessary component of commerce on the web, and that web advertising is eventually going to succeed the way it has on television. That's because the web is a pull medium, and TV is a push medium. You don't sit there at your computer and look at whatever it wants to show you. So: (1) Web advertising depends on web use. (2) Web use depends on compelling web offerings. (3) Most compelling web offerings depend on web commerce. (4) Web commerce depends on a way to move money. (5) Money-movement methods must be secure and well-integrated into current money-movement methods (like cash, Visa, checks). (6) No matter which medium you choose for commerce, it all has to run on something that's compatible with everyone else. The higher the number, the more likely a product serving that level is to be widely adopted and thus succeed. The lower the number, the more it depends on the layers below it, and the more vulnerable it is. NSCP is 6. VRSN is 5. CyberCash is 4. Real Networks is 2. SI is 2. DoubleClick is 1. That's my theory. Feel free to criticize it, everyone, or (as is the way nowadays) turn it into a personal attack on me. Postscript: Note that Microsoft would be in level 7: no matter whether you even use the web, just to turn on your computer you need us. It's also trying to subsume level 6 into level 7. So that's exactly why MSFT is threatening NSCP.