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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (9753)	4/10/1998 3:57:00 PM
From: Sonny Blue	Respond to of 27307

You are right. Never take anyone's opinion seriously. Just for fun reading, please! Here is another one: Cramer on New Media Vs. Old 4/9/98 8:14 AM ET Why didn't somebody buy Yahoo! Why didn't somebody buy America Online? When I talk to hedge fund managers, all I ever hear about is what great shorts these two stocks are. Oh, the rap is so easy against Yahoo: It has fewer than 500 employees and it has a $5 billion market cap. And the rap against AOL was pretty easy: too-crummy service that went out a lot. People stream into my office all day and tell me that General Electric could step in any minute, or Microsoft or IBM. Wrong! First of all, those older-line companies already have tried it and for the most part have failed. They are either too ossified or too blinded by what engineers want instead of what consumers want. They have no feel for the medium. Second, Yahoo works. Everybody loves Yahoo. I'm on Yahoo constantly. It's dynamite. You think it has 90 million page views because it sucks? Third, America Online has gone quietly from a poorly run operation to a consumer juggernaut. I have been won back by its reliability. It seems lately to be winning the war against spam, and if it does, I will go back all the way and even start using its mail again. Okay, I know, Cramer's biased. He has deals with these guys or he's talking to them about projects for TheStreet.com. He owns shares in them. Guilty, guilty, guilty. But ask yourself why I own shares in them. Because they are the only games in town. Ask yourself why I want TheStreet.com to get close to these guys: because they are the only games in town. Ask yourself how I know this: because other than the Lawn Mower Man, you gotta look long and hard to find someone who is inside the Net more than I am, if only by virtue of how little I sleep. Which brings me to the first question: Why didn't Disney or General Electric, or Bertelsmann, or Newhouse or The New York Times or Dow Jones, or Time Warner or Viacom or Gannett, buy these companies when they Could? They would all be cooking with gas if they left them as stand-alones. Now they have revenues and cash and an extremely valuable currency that they can do what they want with. Heck, they could get into any businesses they want now. Should you come in up here if you don't own Yahoo? I can't answer that question for you. If it goes down, you will think I am a charlatan; if it goes up, you will think you are a genius. But I know this. The run these companies have had is justified by the growth of this medium. These companies did not happen by accident. Believe me, if MSNBC were doing as well as these guys, the powerhouse organizations involved would have already spun it off, a la CBS Sportsline, to reap the public market value. Now, of course, it is probably too late for any older publishing/media company to buy in. The dilution would be spectacularly awful for whoever does. But a year and a half ago these stocks were in the dumpster. Why didn't anybody buy them then? Think about it, there are publishing deals all of the time, book firms get shuffled like playing cards. Radio and TV stations swap around like baseball cards. I think the answer is pretty clear. The guys who run these old-line firms? They aren't Net surfers. They may not even be PC users. These are guys who like print, they like the feel of it, they like the ink of it. They have spent their whole lives in it. Many of them don't even use email, for Pete's sake. They regard the PC as something the nerd next to them flips on while they are riding on a plane. They are horse riders in the age of the tank. They will be crushed by Yahoo and AOL, like so much cavalry against steel. I'm betting on it. *****