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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (21515)	4/24/1999 5:50:00 PM
From: t2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

If the road is ultimately a utility then the value is in the destinations not the roads The problem is that the road can be directed to a certain preferred place. IMHO, this is why MSFT has not been able to abandon their ISP. The problem will be the ones who control the road will be able to influence your destination in the beginning. In the beginning is when you get familiarity with a site. I could be a bit biased but I like MSN over Yahoo maybe just because i got used to it. I find it user friendly. I like the business information from Yahoo but I am directed from another site to it. We keep hearing about free internet access (i am not sure if it exists). What would be the point of offering free net access? The answer is to get eyeballs to a particular site. I would not be surprised to see regular net access becoming free in the near future. At this point everyone wants the gateway to the net so a person can be directed to the "right" place. What is in it for the ISP who is offering free service? I realize the battle is between the big players--AOL, AT&T, MSFT. Maybe the small ISP can work out deals with the portals and get a lot of cash but the big guys want to be the Internet. I agree with many of your points but I believe they will be valid down the road but not yet. Now the battle is for brand preference in which AOL appears to be in the lead. At the present time the internet has not reached its maturity. It is due to this infancy that a scramble to get the new users accustomed to a particular is a big battleground. The analogy is MS Office. Once people got familiar with a product or service, it is hard to switch to an alternative no matter how good that is. Lotus and Corel cannot make a dent in Microsoft's dominance in the Office suites. MSFT wants to cover all the bases with DSL,Cable, etc..I sense that MSFT has realized that if they were to abandon the ISP service, they are exposing themselves to much risk. They don't want to end up "begging" AT&T or ATHM (for example) to direct some traffic to MSN. In a sense it may just be an insurance policy for them in the long run.