Behind Excite@Home's Failure And AT&T's Involvement
from the lots-of-mistakes dept
Cory writes in to tell us about the latest from Bob Cringely about the impending death of Excite@Home. Cringely, not surprisingly, says the analysts take on the situation is completely wrong. He says that the problems were the following. (1) @Home never really knew what to do with Excite when they bought them, causing them to waste resources. (2) AT&T did everything they could to make @Home fail so they could swoop in and buy up the assets for next to nothing. (3) Broadband access just isn’t being accepted by consumers as fast as people expected. There’s simply no real business there. His points are good, though I tend not to trust anything Cringely has to say about Excite, since he always acts as if Excite was formed through his guidance (he even mentions, as he always does, how he met with the Excite founders while they were still in the garage). There’s no doubt that Excite@Home made some very silly mistakes along the way, but I’m not sure they destroyed the Excite cash cow (as Cringely implies).
Comments on “Behind Excite@Home's Failure And AT&T's Involvement”
No Subject Given
What do you mean “Broadband access just isn’t being accepted by consumers as fast as people expected”. I live in an affluent and “techie” neiborhood and I am 1000 feet to far away from the CO for DSL and cable modem is not available either. All the broadband companies don’t have enough product available and they are ignoring the requests of the consumer. Furthermore, the death of Ricochet did not have to be. They could have marketed their product where there was little or no competition!
Re: No Subject Given
Don’t ask me… ask Cringely. That was his point.
Help clear up the excite@home confusion
I stand poorly informed about the business structure between Cox Communications, AT&T and excite@home. I called the Cox people after the auditors message went out about excite@home and got a very convoluted answer. The help desk folks were not being coy, its just complex. Can someone more fully describe who’s ox is getting gored, what the risks to users are, etc? Cable modem use in San Diego County is very high. There are about 700K users of this system and I would hope that would create an economic draw.
Re: Help clear up the excite@home confusion
There are some details on the relationship here. Apparently Cox used to own shares in Excite@Home, but they exchanged them for AT&T stock. At the same time, they kept an exclusive agreement with Excite@Home saying they would only use them as their ISP – but today announced they’re backing out on that deal.