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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RocketMan who wrote (176)	12/29/1998 6:42:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 41369

Actually, I DID get five bucks on my first attempt at this! Infrastructure is called "barrier to entry"...something you need to keep out competition. Like Intel has. Like AOL doesn't have. Sears was bid up to fantastic levels because of the Sears Catalog, that brought the convenience of home shopping to every tiny frontier town. Honestly, I don't see any difference between the hardcover and catalog versions of catalog merchandising..except it's theoretically easier for me to find the cheapest price on the internet. This is called "deflation"...it means that severe price wars will eat up profit margins and drive prices down. It means that stock prices will go down, not up. Content and advertising revenue is a business expense, not a profit. The big difference between AOL and a utility is money derived from advertising revenue (like the Yellow Pages). The big IF: if companies find the cost of the internet maintenance and advertising cost doesn't give an adequate return on investment in an era of deflationary pricing, they won't pay the advertising costs or go to a cheaper competitor. Conversely, the utilities are getting into the internet business.. If you got free ISP with your utility bill, would you switch? I think the biggest sales pitch AOL (or Yahoo, for that matter) is its addictive quality. I need to see more studies here, but it looks like an increasing number of people are literally addicted to the internet sites..just like Ko or Mo, there's a certain set of the population who are addicted for life and form a repeat audience. The stock market, as a form of gambling, feeds a lot of the addictive qualities..it's also leading to a level of bankruptcies without equal in US history. These are interesting times we live in.

To: RocketMan who wrote (176)	12/29/1998 7:10:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

Oh, one more big difference... A site like AOL or yahoo can act pretty much like the CIA...it can gather all kinds of information about you, your preferences and interests, compile the data and sell it to whomever. There's absolutely nothing illegal about it. There's no privacy on the internet and the big corporations are keenly interested in gathering this database, it's cheap to get from an internet site and costs a fortune to collect using human interviews. I suppose it might continue to grow as a government and corporation-supported spying network on internet users, as I expect this is a pretty profitable business to be in. On the other hand... if you KNEW this was their business, would you continue to use their site? Hmmm.... I've been using the internet in some version since 1980. It was really developed by the DoD and CIA, still used by the gov for eavesdropping, and nodes are still in existence to shut down global internet traffic in the event of a national emergency. Even commercial satellites have encryption packages on them. The mania is astonishing to watch...but it would be even more fun to watch the addicts if their heroin was withdrawn one day.