To: Bob Zacks who wrote (3001 ) 10/29/1998 2:47:00 PM From: E. Graphs Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 29970
This guy isn't living scared. In fact, he sounds all too confident.fnews.yahoo.com >>Now the new bogeyman is cable and telephone. But who? ATT WorldNet?I don't think so. The Financial Times told us that T (Nasdaq:T - news) wanted to buy AOL, but it wasn't for sale. Now they are going to crush AOL? With what? MCI WorldCom (Nasdaq:WCOM - news) -- not a factor by its own admission. Time Warner (NYSE:TWX - news) ? Hold it. TWX spent millions upon millions of dollars developing Pathfinder, its own, in-house AOL, and what does it do this quarter? It makes AOL the exclusive People provider, a tacit admission that AOL has beaten Pathfinder. TWX is retreating, not advancing. Cox Cable (NYSE:COX - news) ? Oh please. Are we talking about At Home (Nasdaq:ATHM - news) Maybe a few hundred thousand have debated that system. AOL has paying users, millions of them. >>That cable/telephone challenge has no business being in the fourth graph because there is no effective challenge right now. Don't make one up to confuse us, please. >>Now, the high-speed Internet access threat. Again, with the At Home? The numbers don't add up. Are you talking about open systems? AOL is opening its system; heck, that was one of the most stressed points on the call. Who is this challenge coming from? Who is this competition? Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) ? Nope -- not pushing that challenge. Infoseek (Nasdaq:SEEK - news) and Excite (Nasdaq:XCIT - news) ? I don't think so. They fell behind AOL this quarter. (I am short SEEK.) IBM, Intel? Microsoft? Ameritech (NYSE:AIT - news) ? The government? A fifth column somewhere? The Journal itself? No one. That's right. No one. >>At this moment in time, this snapshot of the world, there is no credible counterforce to AOL, which is why it had such a great quarter to begin with, and why its dominance is less an issue now than any other time I can recall.<<