Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Netscape -- Giant Killer or Flash in the Pan? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Winston Kim who wrote (3230)	5/26/1998 1:10:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4903

Netscape could surge if it manages the numbers to show a break even position AND pushes the Internet Entry Portal angle in its forward looking comments. BUT, it would help if they showed a little progress on the look of their home page, which is pretty much unchanged. I see they have removed Yahoo from the list of search engines, but I can't figure out why Infoseek is the default; it should be Excite, shouldn't it???? Frank

To: Winston Kim who wrote (3230)	5/26/1998 3:14:00 PM
From: Andreas Samson	Respond to of 4903

Netscape has fundamental flaws - An Analysis...and an invitation to debate Try the following analogy. This guy bought a big, dilapadated house in my neighborhood, renovated it completely, turned it into a real showcase, put it on the market for $460,000. He doesn't understand why he hasn't gotten a single bid. It's a great house, but it's right on a corner, on a busy intersection, next to a gas station, with no real yard and no privacy. 'I don't understand,' he says, 'houses three blocks away are selling for $650,000, my house is a comparative bargain...' But it aint....cause no one wants to shell out close to half a million to buy a house with fundamental flaws. They don't care how pretty it looks. It's next door to a gas station. Trying to attach hypothetical values to Netscape based on the multiples attributed to other internet stocks like Yahoo! or Excite, which many people have done, is an exercise in wishful thinking. FACT: Microsoft is giving away IE. This is a perfectly legal practice. No matter what action the federal court takes - bundle, un-bundle - NSCP will probably never make another dollar selling browsers. This a fait accompli. The core revenue stream is gone. FACT: The big news last week for NSCP was not the DOJ action, but the shipping of Windows 98. Not that anyone seriously thought the DOJ would actually block shipment at the last moment, but W98, with its so-deeply-embedded-in-the-code-you-cant-get-rid-of-it IE4, represents a real stake in the heart to NSCP....by the time the courts catch up with this one, MSFT will be issuing, say, Windows 2001, with the code rewritten just enough to tap dance around some federal edict. Call me a conspiracist, but with probably enough embedded bugs to create persistent hassles for Communicator users. FACT: Netscape is shifting horses mid-stream in an attempt to become an internet portal/media company, eighteen months late. Too late? I couldn't say. It's all moving too fast. I will say this, Wall Street over the past few years has shown little interest in 'value plays' in the tech market. The big money would rather go with a front-runner in every sector of each industry, and pay a premium to do so. FACT: Yes, NSCP nailed down some contracts in the past several weeks, each a substantial improvement over last year, commeasurate with the increase in Web traffic, but these contracts were expected. Again, the big news is Yahoo! breaking out on its own. That they felt their brand was strong enough that they no longer needed Netscape, says a lot. For what it's worth, Jim Cramer doesn't like Netscape. In a recent column he mentioned difficulties he had trying to set up a Street.Com site there and how they went with Yahoo! instead. The essence of his comments were that they didn't have their act together. Bungling things with Cramer doesn't bode well for the media savvy of a media company in its germinal stages. Cramer makes calls on companies rather sparingly, and in several years of reading his column I have found them to be deadly accurate. Call it an omen. I welcome any debate my comments arouse on the thread. Luck to all of you....long and short