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To: Tom Kearney who wrote (44050)	3/5/1999 7:57:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Glenn - Here's a partial roster of early leaders: Oracle - 1st functional relational database: today has essentially no competition in its main product line (though some is one the way, maybe) MSFT - Bill Gates dropped out of college to work on the the VERY 1st PC, a piece of junk whose output consisted 16 lights that could blink on and off!!! INTC - co-inventor of the integrated circuit; TI the other co-inventor was too enamored of their military profits ('a la Walmart?) to put much effort into the product early on Apple - You would have made a lot of money with Apple for 10 years: the 1st quality home computer Lotus - 1st great PC software product - a money machine for years But the best is Ashton-Tate - a lousy database, but because they were 1st, they had to be bad for 8 years before anyone could catch them Tom, We agree here in a sense. You chose six for your list. Three are still the leaders while three are far from being the leaders. Let's add a seventy such as CompuServe which was by far had an early lead. AOL kind of did them in. What we have is simply competition in the market place and 50% of the early leaders continue to be leaders and other fail. Your point about making money on the stock price is accurate as long as one knew in advance their stocks would climb. In hindsight we know but foresight is more difficult. The early lead never kept these firms out front. Execution is what made the difference over years. Glenn