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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Microsoft does it again - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Impulse buys have never been so easy or so difficult! Swap tales of online shopping in Table Talk's Digital Culture area ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for great technology book bargains ___________________ R E C E N T L Y There goes the neighborhood By Janelle Brown Are free Web page companies like GeoCities truly "building communities"? (01/19/99) The telephone toll By David Brake For European Net users saddled with high phone rates, the meter is always running (01/18/99) Card bards By Robert Rossney Legend of the Five Rings isn't just a card game -- it's a whole new kind of storytelling (01/15/99) The 21st Challenge No. 17 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau The e-mail lifeline -- summing up the year (01/15/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Why we just might get fast Internet lines in our homes before we're all dead (01/14/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

A corporate game of Internet Monopoly @Home's purchase of Excite poses a new challenge to AOL and leaves Microsoft on the sidelines -- for now. - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Waiting for that game of Internet Monopoly to end? Not only is it not over yet, it's accelerating -- as an ever-wider group of giant telephone companies, hungry cable providers, wary media corporations and feisty online newcomers all push their pieces around the board in increasingly baroque deals fueled by the play money of inflated Net stocks. That's the first message in Tuesday's news that @Home, the provider of high-speed Internet access via cable, will buy Excite, the portal site that has long played Avis to Yahoo's Hertz. Coming on the heels of last November's purchase of Netscape by America Online, the Excite deal shows just how fluid and wacky this business remains. Though the stock deal is valued at $6.7 billion, neither company has ever shown a profit. But in today's climate, just bringing up that fact makes one sound like an incorrigible Luddite. Excite began its life as an also-ran search engine called Architext that became a second-rank search site by swallowing Webcrawler and Magellan, and rose to its No. 2 position in the competitive portal business through smart marketing and aggressive aggregation of services. @Home placed a very early bet on the rise of high-speed, "broadband" access to the Internet via cable modem, and though its growth has been slow (the company now boasts 330,000 customers), it's generally viewed as the pioneer and leader in its business. So how do these companies complement each other -- aside from sharing the same street in Redwood City, Calif., making the merger that much simpler? As the official press release puts it, in verbiage that was parrotted in much of the news coverage of the story, "The companies aim to accelerate broadband adoption by exposing the millions of Excite narrowband users to the benefits of a media experience enhanced by the broadband platform." Huh? Did they really say that? "Exposing" Excite's millions of users to @Home's broadband "media experience" would be a nice trick; unfortunately, it's beyond either company's technological capabilities. No matter how loyal an Excite user you may be, you can't be "exposed" to @Home's broadband service unless you receive it -- that is, unless your local cable company offers cable modem service through @Home, and you sign up and install it and junk your old 28.8K or 56K modem. Maybe what @Home and Excite mean by "exposure" is what the rest of us call "marketing" -- that is, Excite's users won't actually be able to sample @Home's high-speed service, but they may well be bombarded with advertising for it. Still, the bottleneck preventing more people from picking broadband isn't a lack of "exposure" to the service; it's that cable companies have to upgrade their networks to offer broadband in the first place, and that takes a ton of money and a good deal of time. - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T__P A G E .|. AOL vs. @Home, and everyone vs. Microsoft