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

To: rhet0ric who wrote (8803)	3/13/1998 10:51:00 AM
From: steve lipson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

They aren't making a mistake, they are making a point about who is going to be in position to call most of the shots and, as a result, reap the lion's share of the rewards. To quote myself from last year on this thread: Message 3067205 >>How could enough consumers ever find out about www.thisisamazing.com or www.thisisevenmoreamazing.com to make any of those sites profitable? The answer -- and the true money making position to occupy -- is to be the TV Guide of the Web. Now, TV Guide makes a pretty good living sorting out the confusion we face deciding what to watch on at most 100-plus TV stations. So imagine the value-added potential for AOL as an amalgamator and organizer of gazillions of channels of web content. People get distracted and confused thinking of AOL as an access provider, or looking at its proprietary content and stacking that up against everything available from all other Web sources. That's just AOL's variation on the tried-and-true marketing formula of giving away the razors and selling the blades. It creates a physical tie to the customer that YHOO, XCIT etc. don't have. There are advantages and disadvantages to this strategy, YHOO et. al. don't have the expenses and other baggage of providing access, so I'm not saying AOL has hit on the perfect strategy...<<