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

To: Bob Zacks who wrote (5139)	2/7/1999 8:16:00 AM
From: Hiram Walker	Respond to of 29970

Hey Bob, I resemble that remark. Heck I am so bearish,I think I just went into hibernation. But bearish on AOL, not ATHM. msnbc.com Has AOL met its Waterloo?? IN AN AUDACIOUS move, Dixons Group Plc, which most people knew as a dull but hardy retail group selling everything from vacuum cleaners to microwaves, has pulled off a startling dawn raid that has left AOL and its other competitors shaken. Dixons' victory weapon: it entered the Internet service provider market and cut the price — to nothing. And it claims it has figured out a way to do this and still make money. At the Dixons headquarters in an unassuming office park north of London, secrecy was deemed vital. Nobody got into the project offices without signing a non-disclosure agreement. Even guests invited to the launch party last September had no idea what they were turning up to. Yet not even Dixons, an organisation with a reputation for bare-knuckled management, could have dared to expect that its invasion of the Internet would go so well. Just sixteen weeks later, Dixons has turned the British Internet scene on its ear. In Britain, Internet growth has been slower than in America because, perversely, consumers have had to pay twice for Internet access. There is the standard monthly fee to a service provider — AOL, for example, charging between £4.95 ($8) and £16.95 ($27), depending on usage. Then, on top, there is the cost of the local telephone call to connect to the Internet service provider (ISP). There are no free local connections here; the cost of dialling into an ISP, at a local call rate, varies from around 6p (10 cents) a minute during the day, to 60p ($1) an hour at weekends. For anyone spending even 10 hours a month online, the cost is easily double what an American would pay. This pattern of double charging for Internet access is common throughout Europe. No surprise, therefore, that Europeans lag behind Americans as Net users. No more than 16 percent of Britons have Internet access; in America, the comparable figure is almost double. Hiram