Tom Madigan writes:

> Oh, great!!!  And to think that I *used* to respect Netscape.
>
> Without going into a diatribe about how crappy AOL is (no offense, Wirt and
> others), I find it hard to believe that a company as good as Netscape is
> going to bed with a [expletive deleted] such as AOL. One of Netscape's best
> offerings recently has been that of free email (bring your own ISP) and its
> NetMail is a pretty good online mailer.  Among its features is an anti-spam
> filter that allows you to block any mail from a certain sender, ISP or even
> an entire domain, if you wish.  Guess who's the first entry in my anti-spam
> file? You've got it -- anything from AOL!!  Nobody that I correspond with
uses
> AOL as their ISP and most posts I've received from an AOL user (this group
> excepted!) are trash.

I certainly take no offense, Tom, but you're making a common mistake. You're
confusing AOL, the company, with its subscribers. That's a little bit like
blaming the gas & electric company for those customers who commit murder (just
to create an example of a non sequitur :-).

I've been a subscriber of AOL's now for 5 years -- and I have always found it
very valuable. When I first subscribed, I was paying AOL $100-$250/month.
Although I considered that cost quite high at the time, I also found the
service valuable enough to keep paying the charges.

Now, due do a significant rate reduction, I pay AOL a flat $9.95/month, and on
the whole, I get nothing but excellent service. AOL isn't just an ISP. It has
traditionally been a content provider, in a manner than no other ISP is. As
the web has grown up, some of that content (Time magazine, Grollier's
Encyclopedia, the Motley Fool, etc.) has unfortunately moved off of AOL and
onto the web, and I regret that. Access to these sites is now significantly
slower, filled with advertisements, and in some cases, available only with a
subscription fee.

Nevertheless, it doesn't matter if I like or dislike AOL. The bottom-line
reason that AOL can buy Netscape is its bottom-line -- and that bottom-line is
summarized in just one graph:

http://www.stockmaster.com/wc/form/P1?template=sm/chart&Symbol=AOL&Duration=60

During the five years that are plotted, AOL's valuation has risen 90x over its
original market price. That's an extraordinary rise in such a short period of
time, the unusualness of which is made even more evident when plotted against
the rise in the S&P 500 value over the same period of time (the purple line),
most of which encompassed a boom market of unusual magnitude itself. AOL can
now readily afford to purchase almost anything it wishes, if the recipient is
willing to accept $4 billion of its stock.

Wirt Atmar