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).
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Help clear up the excite@home confusion
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