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

To: steve lipson who wrote (8802)	3/13/1998 10:32:00 AM
From: rhet0ric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

Funny thing about that. Biz Week requires a pay subscription for Web access. But it's free if you're on AOL. No problem. Some friendly SIer posted it at: techstocks.com That Business Week article makes the same mistake that Fortune did. Basically they lump AOL together with other onlines services and other portal sites in a single arena called "the Web." What I'm saying is that AOL may be on the Web, but the network itself isn't. You wrote: If their marketing continues to be this effective, AOL will effectively own the Web. Please go back and read my post. You are blurring distinctions in the same manner as BW and Fortune. Maybe I should make a new distinction between AOL and aol.com. aol.com is in a fight with Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., etc. AOL is in a fight with the Web. Because aol.com can leverage AOL, aol.com should do pretty well, at least for now. But I think that AOL is way overmatched versus the Web. And if AOL sinks, aol.com will sink with it. What AOL is doing with aol.com is actually really strange, if you think about it. In order to compete with Yahoo and everyone else, aol.com needs to convert all of AOL's proprietary services into Web-compatible ones. If aol.com succeeds, AOL will then have two distinct but very similar franchises. Do those two franchises compete? Do they complement each other? Or is AOL quietly transitioning their proprietary network to the Web? In my view, the latter is their only viable strategy, long-term. though it has tons of risks. For one thing, the cost of converting their proprietary network to TCP/IP, getting all their users to switch over, and so on, would be horrendously expensive. And even if they pull it off, they are at that point an over-priced ISP and a portal site with huge competition. rhet0ric