Subject: Re: New Century Network From: docdon@pinn.net (Don Taylor) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 05:36:06 -0500

Sender: owner-online-news@marketplace.com
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO
X-Status: A

At 10:32 PM 4/24/95 -0400, PFiske@aol.com wrote:
>What are we to make of this: NCN is announced, with a goal of establishing a
>single standard for many prospective member papers to follow in setting up on
>the web. Several member companies have bought Netscape, which seems to
>provide NCN with a good platform for its venture, and some other promising
>stuff (like a company that serves MLS realtors). A few days later, a couple
>of other members of the NCN consortium buy Open Market, apparently a
>competitor of Netscape, and say they are going to create the complete
>platform from which publishers can deal with their customers directly, or
>some such. If these are competing platforms, as characterized in WSJ,
>acquired by members of the same NCN consortium, then:
>1) Are they less than serious about a single standard, and by implication the
>whole project?

Maybe they're just practicing the old idea of not putting all their eggs in
one basket (or hedging their bet in some circles).

>2) Are they trying to get technologies that might compete with whatever
>standard NCN chooses off the market by buying them all up?

Maybe negotiations for the deals were independent.

>All insights gratefully recieved

I would imagine a consortium of this size would be very difficult to focus
on singular objectives, even after its been in place for a while. I'm
working on a *much* smaller one and can't imagine the nightmares they're
having. Every member has their own agenda, which may or may not coincide
with the consortium's. Oy vey!

Talley Ho

    Don

-~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ -~^ 
C.          Helping small business do better with information technology.
 B.   310 Wells Ct                                   Hampton, VA 23666-6240 USA
  D.  voice: 804.825.0294   Don Taylor, President        email: docdon@pinn.net
   T.       _____________________________________________________________
              CAUTION:  This may be FOLLI material. By receiving it you 
              may have violated the Communications Decency Act (proposed).
________________________________________________________________________________


From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Fri Apr 21 12:31:28 1995
Received: from marketplace.com by cnj.digex.net with SMTP id AA12445
  (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Fri, 21 Apr 1995 12:31:26 -0400
Received: (from majordom@localhost) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id GAA22869 for online-news-outgoing; Fri, 21 Apr 1995 06:44:20 -0600
Received: from mail04.mail.aol.com (mail04.mail.aol.com [152.163.172.53]) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id GAA22864 for ; Fri, 21 Apr 1995 06:44:17 -0600