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To: GST who wrote (36896)	1/26/1999 7:01:00 PM
From: S. M. SAIFEE	Respond to of 164684

Agree, the trend is down and steeper than up trend. I wonder the trade @ 199 1/8 recorded on 1/8/99 still held by greatest fool or the trader was super smart to bail out next day @ 182.

To: GST who wrote (36896)	1/26/1999 7:05:00 PM
From: Yojimbo	Respond to of 164684

The competition is heating up fast the fact most often overlooked. given the onsale "model," the new & expected entrants (drugstore.com, wal-mart, altavista, yhoo), the ultra-low barriers to new entrants and forthcoming shopping agents... there won't be a red nickel to split among them all. the battle has been fought and the consumer has won. y

To: GST who wrote (36896)	1/26/1999 7:13:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

The competition is heating up fast. Expenses are mounting. We are being warned by AMZN itself, which is a bit out of character. And there is a total .30 cent loss. They will need to raise cash soon -- I wonder how they will do it. It will be hard to borrow to pay salaries and operating costs. This is a very risky investment. It would be interesting to know if the insider selling has accelerated. I believe we could see that as early as tomorrow. Glenn

To: GST who wrote (36896)	1/26/1999 8:27:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

AOL chief talks about software, service and future of Net by San Jose Mercury News If there can be said to be a clear leader in the Internet industry, it is America Online. Even before its planned acquisition of Netscape Communications, AOL attracted one of the Web's largest audiences and posted Internet-related revenues greater than those of any other company except some in the hardware business. During a recent visit to San Jose, AOL founder and Chief Executive Steve Case met with Mercury News staff. An edited transcript follows: Q: If I asked you to define AOL with one word, would you call it a media company, a software company, a services company, a commerce company, an Internet . . .? A: I think we are a little bit of each of what you've just described. I think of ourselves as the leading interactive-services company. We're really trying to build this new medium. It's a global medium; we're trying to make it as pervasive as the telephone is or the television and more valuable, and so we're really a company trying to help build this new medium. And the closest thing, I've said for many years, is sort of interactive services. . . . It's like a newspaper with circulation revenue and advertising revenue. It's obviously a communication company because there's one heck of a lot of people sending one heck of a lot of messages around the world and it's becoming a very powerful way to communicate. It's increasingly a commerce company. . . . It's enabled by technology; whenever it's possible we have integrated technology to make things easy or accessible or so forth. So it's a little bit of each of those things. Q: As part of the recent deal, you acquired a whole bunch of software, which is not something that you guys were used to doing, selling software to enterprises. . . . Can you talk a little bit about how that's going to play out? A: We haven't been a software-products company but we have been a software- development company. We probably have 500 or 600 people now developing software. Indeed, one of the reasons that AOL has been successful is the innovations we've done on software over the past decade, making things easier and more accessible for a mass market. . . . The difference with Netscape is really being in the software-solutions business, enabling companies to build enterprise solutions, particularly e-commerce solutions. We've done that, too, because if you look at the deals we've signed in the last couple of years as we made this shift in our business model and started focusing on advertising and e-commerce. . . . That's really where the Netscape e-commerce platform comes in and then the alliance with Sun will give us the ability to talk to more companies. Q: Could you talk a little bit about broad-band? It sounds like you think your subscribers are not going to get on that wave very quickly. So what do you predict there? A: A growing number of customers will want high speed and they'll be willing to pay extra for it and we are committed to providing those customers with a series of broad-band choices. . . . At the same time, we don't expect it to be an overnight phenomenon. . . . Our vision for broad-band is that it is an evolutionary component of this emerging interactive medium and that the best way to think of it is an upgrade market. . . . Well, if it's an upgrade market, the most successful way to jump-start that market is to go to existing customers and say, "Would you like your service to be faster? Would you be willing to pay extra for it?". . . We, a company like AOL, and others that already have a customer base, are the logical marketers of broad-band services. Q: Why is it not a good argument that the deal you made with Netscape and Sun . . . could be a real threat to Microsoft? A: A number of things we are doing are competing with things Microsoft is doing, and if we step up our activity here it will result in more competition with Microsoft. That's true in the portal space. The acquisition of Netscape makes us more competitive in the Web portal side which therefore makes more competition for the Microsofts and Yahoo's and Excite's and so forth. . . . But nothing we are doing is competitive with Microsoft's Windows operating system. And the (antitrust) case, best I can tell, is exclusively about determining "Is Windows a monopoly and, if so, is Microsoft leveraging that monopoly illegally?". . . So it would seem to me that what we're doing with Netscape would have no bearing on the case from a practical standpoint. I don't know what impact it would have from a legal standpoint. Q: Let's talk about the portal business for a while. Even before the AOL- Netscape merger announcement, Netscape was busy increasing the amount of pop- up menus and ads - basically, marketing - that users of its browser and visitors to the Netcenter site experience, in much the same way that AOL has done that for years. Is that the future of life on the Web? A: No, I wouldn't say that. . . . We do pop-ups and if you don't want to see pop-ups you can turn them off. I actually thought Netscape Netcenter was overdoing it on pop-ups. I know coming from AOL that sounds a little bizarre. Q: PCs are not going to disappear tomorrow but, as devices pick up, there's sort of a debate between people who talk about a PC-centric . . . and a network-centric view, sort of broadly aligned with Microsoft and Sun. Which . . .? A: Neither. We respect both but we actually think the consumer-centric view is better than the technology-centric view. . . . I hate to say it because it always sounds arrogant.. . . But there is one benefit of not residing in Silicon Valley. . . . There is a tendency to be overly enthusiastic about the latest, greatest thing and sometime lose sight of the fact that in the consumer world, technology really is a means to an end. And it matters less what it is or how it works and it matters more how does it improve your life?