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

To: E. Davies who wrote (7673)	4/11/1999 3:44:00 AM
From: RTev	Respond to of 29970

I've long thought @home and Microsoft should cozy up together somehow, after all both have AOL as an arch-enemy. I don't think that will happen any time soon. Here's a post of mine from a while ago where I talked about the different goals in context of talk of an ATHM/RoadRunner merger: Message 8518277 I'll repeat that I don't think any of this has much to do with the short-term future of ATHM. As I understand it, the ATHM partnership is narrowly defined as a way to give the MSO partners a way to deliver high-speed internet access for computers. It has nothing to do with settop boxes at this point (as I understand it). The partners can go their own way in that realm. But there seems little doubt that ATHM will be an important part of what AT&T Broadband (nee TCI) does in that area, with or without Cox and the other companies. So why wouldn't they do it in cooperation with Microsoft? Well, I suppose it all depends on your definition of "cooperation" (as either of the Bills might say in a deposition). Microsoft has always used a unique definition of the term that hasn't always been beneficial to its "partners". I'm not sure it's a definition that AT&T or ATHM would be comfortable with. I was struck by this paragraph in the Fortune article about Armstrong that was mentioned a few posts back: Newly in charge of IBM's personal-computer business in 1983, he chose a single manufacturer for the disk drive on the third generation of PCs. When the manufacturer faltered, IBM couldn't deliver. The mistake hastened IBM's loss of primacy in the PC market. Armstrong says: "I'll never single-source a major component again in my life." It remains the darkest blot on his resume. [ Entire article well worth reading at: pathfinder.com ] That doesn't sound like a man who would be willing to have one company in control of a significant device required for use of any part of his network. But Microsoft seems to be driving toward that kind of single-source solution. They seem to want to make Windows CE a necessary part of any device used in that new convergence of internet, TV, publishing, and all the other stuff. They don't care about what pipes are used to deliver the content, but they want to control the platform on which that content is presented. It sounds to me like both AT&T and ATHM want to put more intelligence and service into the network itself and to make it device-agnostic. I see them as companies with significantly different goals. (And I also see ATHM and MSFT as two companies that are very much worth investing in whatever happens in that area.)