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

To: Frank Arena who wrote (3240)	5/26/1998 6:42:00 PM
From: Ted Shelton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4903

Frank: I think you are missing something. NSCP now wants to become a "search" company -- the trendy word is "Portal." A funny thing happened over the past year. The search engines added a whole bunch of other features and all of the sudden they started to look a lot like AOL. They are providing a complete environment for users so that once a person gets used to going to Excite or Yahoo (or AOL for that matter) they keep going back. And because they always find what they are looking for (whether it is search results, a new car, or tickets to Hawaii) they never have to look anywhere else. This builds brand loyalty over time (assuming you treat people well, give them a reason to feel some affinity for you, etc) and becomes the single most valuable thing in media. Now, NSCP has had a lot of people coming to them for a long time, on accident -- your point about their site selling software. Along the way they said "hey, we could make some extra dough if we charged other people to send them our people." OK -- but no brand loyalty. Now, in the last six months, Mike Homer and company have woken up (by the way, a lot of people at NSCP had been saying this for the past two years). They said -- "Netscape is actually a strong brand -- and we have all these people coming here -- lets see if we can get them to stay!" So now Netscape is going to start being the portal -- and building as many new features and functions into their site as fast as they can. And you will see them start to build up their brand. Netcenter will be targeted at business people first -- because it is a strong, valuable niche, that is relatively easy to market to. By the way, on the deal with Excite -- I understand they give some of their search technology to NSCP as well. So now NSCP is a search engine too... yours, Ted