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

To: QuietWon who wrote (5279)	2/9/1999 5:19:00 PM
From: Jay Lowe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Thank you. It's good to hear you are agitating for better service. I'm concerned and interested because I think this is one of the major challenges to ATHM ... that they move in a domain which is one of the worst areas of consumer service ... the MSO's, in general, and there are exceptions (Cox?), don't know how or apparently care how to treat customers well ... their local monopolies tend to support a "like it or lump it" attitude which one sees pervade every level of the organization ... from the industries founders to the installers to the phone reps. AT&T knows how to do support and customer relations ... not outstandingly well ... but they do a much better job than cable operators, as far as I can see. I am consistently impressed in my occasional contacts with AT&T cellular service. Several articles have been linked here recently about the interaction of T and the cable guys over control issues. I remark how the cable guys were depicted as taking the "well, why should we give up any control?" attitude. This is amusing and ironic. They should give up control because they don't know what to do with it ... especially as the product delivered enters new areas and impacts people in new and more complex ways. Or they should learn ... but being taught by the market is a risky form of education. Service ... people service and performance under-delivery ... we'll see this issue again and again in many forms in the days ahead. Good signs -- MSO's let more service oriented organizations front for them. Bad signs -- MSO's try to control the whole pie themselves. This interacts with Frank's and ahhaha's comments about the necessity to maintain a firewall between telco and cable ops ... to keep cable ops off the regulators short range scan. Be on the lookout for new paradigms as worldviews shift!