[CTRL] Fwd: Fw: Kleiner Perkins is HARBORING!

[Kris Millegan]

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Again, and again, Yakuza ....   ----- Original Message ----- From: Lois Battuello To: Linda Minor ; Catherine Austin Fitts ; katie ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 11:10 AM Subject: Kleiner Perkins is HARBORING!   Check this out, down and out and to fully shut down, Excite@Home, while Kleiner Perkins harbors one of its keiretsu perps (last paragraph).   CNET tech sites: Price comparisons | Product reviews | Tech news | Downloads | Site map   News.context: Special Reports | Newsmakers | Perspectives   Excite@Home and the lessons of hype By Ben Heskett December 6, 2001 When @Home Network Chief Executive Tom Jermoluk strolled into CNET News.com's offices in the winter of 1998 for an interview, he confidently dubbed the company's broadband business prospects a "no-brainer." Things looked promising for the company then, given the number of cable television subscribers in the country and the deals @Home was striking with operators like Cox Communications and Comcast. Clearly, Jermoluk was on to something. The lack of brain power exhibited during the rise and fall of what is now Excite@Home is truly striking--the broadband equivalent of the ongoing Enron debacle. You see, Jermoluk, or "TJ" as he's known to friends, is right. It is a no-brainer. Excite@Home, with 4.1 million subscribers as of its last quarter, was a slam-dunk. You take the homes passed by a cable network to deliver television, imagine that a certain chunk might like to add fast access to the Web, and what have you got? A bankrupt non-entity that drops service with little notice to hundreds of thousands of loyal customers and subsequently announces its intentions to disappear into thin air by the end of February 2002? It's crazy. Counting just the major strategic snafus, such as the bizarre $6.7 billion merger with Excite to "marry" broadband with Internet content and its Byzantine relationships with its cable partners--particularly AT&T--Excite@Home may be best thought of as a triumph of that most hated of marketing words: synergies. Excite@Home has some assets, such as an Internet network. But it was also born in the Net era, when everything was "virtual" or otherwise represented by some PowerPoint cloud. As investors realized over time, the company was simply a middleman between stodgy cable companies and the Internet, taking a 35 percent toll for every customer along the way. Taking that basic, stable business and extending it to a broadband dreamland where someone would pay for a variety of services we haven't even thought about yet--as is often spoken in technology--and running the operations like the revenue possibilities are infinite was a prescription for disaster. But 4.1 million subscribers don't lie. The loser is, as usual, the typical person who simply wants a fast connection to the Net. What was once a healthy broadband market with a wide array of competition between phone companies, cable companies and start-ups has rapidly dwindled to next to nothing. Stodgy Baby Bell versus stodgy cable company? That hardly seems like a recipe for competition, pricing pressure or innovation. Excite@Home had a little more than 200,000 subscribers back in 1998, when Jermoluk--who now resides at original @Home investor Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers--predicted smooth sailing for the venture. Now, with the dismantling of a 4.1 million subscriber broadband behemoth, millions of customers are left holding the broadband bag as executives and lawyers duke it out for the scraps. Analyzing failed businesses can often be like so much Monday morning quarterbacking--a day late and a dollar short. But no one in the Net era has failed quite like Excite@Home, and as we now see, its demise is the no-brainer.    More Perspectives E-mail story | Print story | Send us news tips Bullpen penner Ben Heskett is CNET News.com's Communications department editor, guiding coverage of the networking and communications industries, which include such companies as Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Excite@Home, Qwest Communications International and WorldCom. His work has been published in the Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, several newspapers in the Massachusetts-based Community Newspaper Co. chain of dailies and weeklies, and Network World magazine. Heskett holds a bachelor's degree in political science and English from the University of Massachusetts in Boston.  Today's Hot Topics   How AT&T measures up   Shocker: A tech IPO   Liberty Alliance grows   Palms for cheap   Has "Goner" got you?   Levin's leavin' AOL  Search     News.comAll CNET    The Web   Latest Headlines display on desktop Liquid Audio target of patent dispute Toshiba, Siemens ditch 3G deal Excite@Home to cease operations @Home CEOs: Glass always half full Mobile phones take to the sea Tech trading tones down eUniverse raises quarterly outlook Bronfman to leave Vivendi Universal Palm chops price of m125 handheld Gates: Broadband woes shackle Net use VeriSign to act as domain-name watchdog Chinese PC makers using XP to curb piracy Korean chipmaker wants cash from Micron Lawson to test software IPO waters @Home contracts await Friday decision "Bandwidth hogs" not at home at AT&T Web users pay price to send e-greetings Queen dismisses Linux Acer spins off peripherals unit New CEO plans to hold AOL's course This week's headlines News Tools Get news by PDA Get news by mobile Listen live to CNET Radio Send us news tips | Contact Us | Corrections | Privacy Policy    Featured services: Holiday Gift Guide | Price Drops | Top 5 Products | PC updates | Tech Jobs | Magazine offers      CNET Networks: CNET | GameSpot | mySimon | TechRepublic | ZDNet About CNET   Copyright ©1995-2001 CNET Networks, Inc. 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