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

To: Yikes who wrote (10790)	7/28/1998 9:59:00 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

No one is forced to use AOL. Absolutely correct. So you say AOL doesn't possess monopoly power, and yet what other service provider can boast anywhere near the number of subscribers AOL has, even discounting ICQ members? Who comes even close? MSN, T, Prodigy, Mindspring, Sprint, @Home? None - absolutely none come close. BTW, no one forced over 12 million people to sign up with AOL. It would be a scary thought for any bear to think that AOL might actually have a monopoly - because if they did bears would be dead in the water. This is actually good news that AOL doesn't possess a monopoly; I hope the federal regulators share your insight. Because it would make future acquistions all the more easier. S.

To: Yikes who wrote (10790)	7/28/1998 10:04:00 AM
From: steve lipson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

You make things so hard for yourself, when the answer could be literally at your fingertips. Think for a minute about the keyboard where you type all your AOL hate messages. Notice the stupid placement of the letters that slows your hand down. This QWERTY principle (for the row of letters above your left hand) is well-known to economists who recognize that things develop and grow from starting points that may later appear quite illogical. After awhile, people need a big reason to change, not just an opportunity. In the early days of Intel, Andy Grove has written, chips needed to be 10X better than transistors in order to sway manufacturers to replace tube transistors. For the most part they weren't, so the chip business grew for many years by serving new applications for NASA and the Defense Department. Perhaps AOL is going to our QWERTY for the next millennium.