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

To: Xenogenetic who wrote (5828)	2/28/1999 5:23:00 AM
From: Robert Scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

@Home has exclusive deals with its cable companies (who also own a signifcant chunk of @Home) so i don't know who this company is going to sign up.

To: Xenogenetic who wrote (5828)	2/28/1999 2:26:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

If you go back a year or so in this thread you'll find a lot of people arguing against me about how TV would be the dominant force bringing the Internet to the masses. MSFT gambled STB would be king. TCI gambled that people are couch potatoes, not Internuts. They were both wrong. TCI's lack of foresight caused a misallocation of funds to Direct TV away from the HFC buildout. MSFT throws money at everything to preserve a dying dinosaur OS. IBM's support of Linux will bury MSFT. Where's my shoe. Let me digress here. When MSFT asserted that IE is an intimate part of Windows, indeed intrinsic to it, they shut the door on the possibility of writing a version of IE for Linux unencumbered. If they tried, that would be a violation of Red Hat et al rights and would be definitive monopolistic practice. Since IE is an OS by MSFT's assertion, it must compete against other OSs, or MSFT must pay the Linux consortium on every copy of IE written for Linux. This accelerates the demise of the Windows hegemony. The alternative would be for MSFT to go it alone which I believe they will do. Windows (and NT) is an intrinsically flawed model so MSFT must create a new OS if they wish to compete with Linux and if they wish to survive. The market would have brought this about without government interference. What's humorous is that NSCP was developing a Linux Navigator, but they thought putting the development money into lawsuit was the better way to fly. Well, they got MSFT, but they can't be the beneficiaries of their investment. So what about WGAT or WAVO. These busts have the same problems everyone has, but they can't deliver because the technology borders on the fraudulent. Have you tried to use your remote to emulate the PC keyboard functionality? I imagine remote storage is possible but at 128K? The PC has tremendous integrated functionality, the VBI supports little. 27 mbps? TCI wishes. If you want bandwidth you won't get it from broadcast, you have to put it in a waveguide, a cable, or you have to pay far more. So what's the point of offering an inferior product at substantially higher price? GIC and SFA have invested in them hoping they can sell some STBs. They can't. So much for the poor investment of big and smart. Large and influential investors just means the proprietors want to fool people into credibility. It is the old error, big is smart. It is no smarter than small. Big has to be safe, and safe means avoiding risk. It's in risk aversion that the risk is high, since the return in low risk is low. When you succeed with the low return you have to take another low risk. The field of low risks looks benign, but it is mined with losses which careful big can't see. You doubt? LTCM. If you're going to take risk, take it, don't hedge.