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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawk who wrote (7312)	2/10/1998 8:45:00 AM
From: Thomas P. Friend	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

Just read your reply. I was just browsing more of the recent responses on this thread, and realized I probably didn't make a couple of my points strong enough. 1. AOL is far easier for the vast majority of online users than direct internet access. If you are here and reading this, you, by definition, are a way above average user. I can tell you, from very extensive experience with average users (many hundreds over the last two years), that the average online user would not understand most of the conversation on this thread. One of the things that binds (and blinds) the users on this thread is their knowledge of the internet, and how to access it and use it, and what choices are available. Print out a few messages from this thread related to AOL vs. ISP issues and show them to some of your friends and neighbors (to whom you have not already given detailed explanations about this). They won't really grasp it. If you think they do, quiz them a little. You will find that they don't. 2. The kids issue (which also applies to a lot of adults). I believe it is a dangerous error (for an AOL bear) to equate the idea that the maturity of free internet chat room technology will quickly lead to a mass exodus from AOL chat rooms. The reason is simple. You don't choose your chat room based on technology; you choose it based on who's going to be there. The analogy that comes to my mind is the bar analogy. When I was college age, you went to the bar that everyone else went to. You didn't go to a bar because it was the "best" bar, except in the sense that it was the best bar because that was where everyone else was going to be. Now, you will say, there was always a new bar opening, and the crowd would often shift to the new bar. And this is true, but here is where the analogy breaks down. It is very easy to get the crowd to shift to a new bar. A few phone calls, and it is all arranged. To accomplish the equivalent in the online chat world, you would need everyone in your group of chatters to simultaneously change to an ISP and learn the new chat program, along with a new browser, a new email interface, etc. To get people to do this simultaneously, en masse, is simply not going to happen. To much inertia to overcome. Anyway, that's my extra two cents. Tom