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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (3712)	12/31/1998 11:59:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

AOL can't buy into ATHM via stock. We discussed this long ago here. Isn't an option. I believe the public is dumb, but only up to a point. I have been saying that they're unpredictable. They have been shoehorned into AOL. So far the other ISPs don't have a compelling enough reason for an AOL user to change. ATHM provides a compelling reason to change. You will find the public is dumb en masse, but you won;'t be able to find one dumb individual. AOL was the pioneer, so they'll get the rush. Who dominates is who has quality. You say MSFT prevented others from competing. This is not a defendable position though all the world would like to believe it. The NSCP complaint wasn't about that as much as they would like to think it. MSFT was the pioneer. They invented the OS. What happened to IBM? Was OS2 so bad it couldn't compete or was it that IBM didn't put the resources into making OS2 the dominate OS? It's IBM's right to not do that. Why didn't SUNW cut the price on their workstations running Solaris and open up the code? That would have checked MSFT for sure. The answer is that they didn't want to forgo the short term profit they were bilking the universities and government out of. They and IBM gambled that the PC would not become what it has. They were wrong and MSFT is now paying because MSFT ran with the opportunity. MSFT could have raised prices and many softwares they had created. Instead, they lowered prices in many areas, just like Standard Oil did in the 1890's that brought screaming little guy operators to the government and ended up in Sherman Anti-Trust. Standard Oil was perceived as the bad guy for lowering oil prices. They did this to drive out unstable small fly-by-night producers who were making the oil business impossible for everyone big and small. The public was the beneficiary, but you don't hear that side of the story, you only hear that Standard was out to destroy the world. Do you hear about the other oil companies and their dirty tricks to destroy Standard? Not a word. We have the same bunch of nonsense with MSFT. Let the market solve the problem. If what MSFT does is so lucrative, others will enter and compete regardless. That's happening now. It can happen because MSFT has NO monopoly. Soon we can go out and buy LINUX OS which supports all peripherals. What does MSFT have then? Eyeballs. They have all these mesmerized fools you think are controlling what is purchased. Wrong. The public will always go after the better times cheaper. The parallel does hold in the AOL case.

To: E. Davies who wrote (3712)	1/1/1999 12:12:00 AM
From: FR1	Respond to of 29970

AOL ... will buy access through ATHM by ... making a deal with ATHM. This is what I always thought. If I were AOL I would scream as loud as I possibly could at the merger to see if I can get paid (given a special deal) to shut up by T. If that doesn't work (and it didn't), I would go to T and ask to buy bandwidth on ATHM backbone without the ATHM interface. Thus, when people sign up for AOL they get connected to cable and when they turn on their sets they see AOL and only AOL. I know T does not own ATHM but they have a overwhelming influence and if ATHM says no to something T wants, T can campaign to change ATHM officials or just buy 11% more of ATHM. T has already said it will be happy to make a deal with AOL.