For this to really work, essentially what really happens here is AOL becomes a direct competitor to Microsoft. |
I think that is a very successful model for any of these companies to follow. |
I think we've already started to see it. I think we're going to continue to see it for the next year, if not two years. |
Microsoft totally wants to own this market, this is a huge market. |
Obviously these guys are really aggressive. They want to utilize their biggest asset, their stock price. |
The feel I've got is a lot of these guys are in for the long haul. If they wanted to sell out they could have sold out much earlier. |
The perception here is that traffic on the Internet was weak and, definitely, Yahoo!'s numbers are going to be used as a proxy or benchmark for the other players in the space. |
The stocks that have been successful are the ones that have reached a very large scale which is to say critical mass basically. |
These companies have to be sitting there trying to figure out competitively how they stack up at this point. |
This is nothing new and it will continue to be a problem. The fact of the matter is, these programs can be easily fooled. If someone wants to get in, there's nothing you can do to stop them. |
Two companies have benefited from the time-to-market advantage: Yahoo! and Amazon. Those are the single success stories. Every single day, it gets more and more competitive. |