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

To: Lyle Bean who wrote (4986)	2/13/1999 6:16:00 AM
From: Lee Martin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

Lyle, I was an Etrade customer since the beginning. Their screwups and poor executions have cost me more $$$ than I want to think about. They claim it's the best online broker for trader's. Hell you can't even get a trade confirmation back on the same day. I can't imagine any daytrader being able to make trades all day long without knowing any of his buy or sell prices. I just moved my $1.8M acct. to Brown &Co. How many other people are abandoning Etrade? You'd be amazed. You can apply this same reasoning to AOL,MSPG,ELNK,PRGY. They all gain and lose customers every day. All I know is that AOL has been increasing the total number of users by about a million customers every couple of months. The people that are leaving are accounted for in the total so I'm not worried at all. What has PRGY got that the others don't? Is it just lower fees that you're talking about. AOL is has a three legged revenue stream 1. advertising 2. ecommerce and 3. subscriptions. They're doing deals every day an growing all three at an incredible rate. As the first two grow AOL will be less dependent on the 3rd. So if they begin to feel pressure from other ISP's they could easily cut rates. But I don't think that will happen any time soon. Why? Their biggest competitor is ATT Worldnet and they just increased rates to match AOL. So obviously neither of the big boys is feeling pricing pressure from the smaller ISP's at this time. Within the next year or so as PC prices continue to fall I think you will see AOL do a deal with a hardware provider to "give away" a PC with a multiyear service contract just like the cellular phone co's have been doing. What do you think a free PC, broadband access via ADSL,cable or wireless from anywhere in the US (soon the world), and a consolidated bill for internet access, long distance and local phone, television, and who knows what else, will do for AOL's subscriber growth? This is where AOL's headed and I think they are one of only a few co's with the resources to pull off this convergence of technologies that everyone has been talking about for so long. Regards,Lee