What does Excite@Home actually offer to the cable companies who provide cable Internet service to their subscribers?
I hear they just offer the Excite.com portal and maybe a few servers and basic infrastructure and so forth. These hardly sound like essential services – it’s no wonder the cable companies can negotiate from a position of strength. A. Yes and no, and it depends who you talk to. First of all let’s address the rationale behind the formation of @Home. A group of cable companies thought it would be a good idea to get into the Internet business, and together they formed a group which sought venture capital for a company which would operate cable Internet service for the whole group. At the time, content was definitely seen as a key moneymaker in this scheme, which explains the logic of the later acquisition of Excite. To hear some people tell it (for example, Steve Harmon, author of Zero Gravity , a book about Silicon Valley venture capital), the funding of AtHome was a longshot “bet” on a heroic technology mission. Finding out how to provide reliable Internet access to home users via cable
