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Technology Stocks : Harmonic Lightwaves (HLIT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Barry Brugman who wrote (2694)	4/19/1999 8:43:00 PM
From: Hiram Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4134

To all, a good article about Paul Allen wanting to bury AOL. Seems there is a little hatred there,just like Gates and Malone. forbes.com Chased away by AOL, Paul Allen left $41 billion on the table. Now it's time for revenge. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em By Robert La Franco IN 1992 MICROSOFT cofounder Paul Allen tried to acquire all of America Online, then a tiny Internet community. Not yet 40, the billionaire keenly saw AOL as a magnet for millions of eyeballs he knew would soon be trained on the World Wide Web. He settled for buying a 25% stake in the public market, enough to make him a nuisance to AOL management. AOL boss Steven Case also resented Allen's dispatch of a 28-year-old financial whiz, William Savoy, to oversee his investment. Case denied operating control to Allen, who sold his shares for a $70 million profit by 1994. Today that 25% would fetch $41 billion--double Allen's net worth. So who can blame him for seeking a new ticket to what he calls the "wired world"? In the past year Allen has acquired six regional cable systems worth $11 billion, amassing the sixth-largest provider in the country. His Charter Communications has 3.7 million subscribers stretching from Los Angeles to North Carolina. It recently floated $3 billion in bonds and may go public this year, raising maybe another $3 billion of capital. The money goes for upgrades and acquisitions--and a chance to show up AOL. Cable these days doesn't just mean television programming. Increasingly, it's a high-speed data conduit loaded with other uses. It is the wire of Allen's world. The money goes to HLIT,both through stock ownership by Allen and upgrades. Allen is gonna use HLIT as the lever to crush AOL,along with his portal Pipeline. Tim