Netscape's Jim Clark has quite a tightrope act going. He has a stock price which gives Netscape a P/E ratio of something like 7,000 (the S&P average right now is about 14), which means he really ought to get some revenue in
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In the heat of the moment, I failed to attribute something to someone who you all should know about: Tim May, one of the founders of cypherpunks, and the person who used a greatly expanded form of this argument yesterday on that list. While I'm not a journalist, I did violate the rules of "News 101", and did not attribute the source of this excellent argument. Heavy lifting, indeed. Of course, that's nothing new. I don't believe I've ever had an original thought in my life... ;-). Cheers, Bob Hettinga P.S. Sorry, Rich, but I just had to do this one... the door, or his investors are going to have his hide. The next thing is, the government is a *really* big customer, and *they* want GAK, in case you haven't noticed. ;-). Couple this with the fact that Netscape is pretty much replicable by concentrated developer effort because its underlying technology is an open standard, *and* the fact that any significant attempt by them to create any real proprietary standards on the internet is practically impossible in the long run, unless they get a whole lot of very big customers in a hurry.
Now, it looks like that's what happened already, because a lot of very
large companies have signed on to using Netscape servers, but you can also see how really weak Netscape's position is when Uncle Sam knocks on their door and asks for a key escrow "bug" in every "secure" Netscape web session. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBML92Q/gyLN8bw6ZVAQF1KQQAkqsgQJ/u9123iqLzYuduTbz6uQJtUuSQ q5DQY/3mwGMqwoXHgWnKkx3gsT0kAZwYWIUTaKB81S7GNsgrTtqabhAy+WlemACT 7bw1TbxRL80GKXSiSfeb1BdCyUyi/yfFO6zB3m8wWB4632Bpo5RqQEd1+jCHmDgw JHo6plE8oQ0= =/Kd2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/
Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<