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Excite@Home May Have To Call It Quits
Plazm writes: "C|net has a story (printer friendly version, of course) that just cropped up this morning about Excite@Home being in financial trouble. Will they befall the same fate as Covad and Loki? Good thing I just purchased my cable modem and broadband service through @Home last week so they could go out of business the next."
Does anybody happen to know WHY these cable Internet companies are going under? They have more business than they can keep up with, which is usually a good thing, unless you're not pricing your product high enough to make a profit. Is that the problem? I'm really stumped, here.
So if excite@home goes under, does that mean large chunks of Canada will only have one broadband ISP? (Telus in BC & Alberta as both Shaw & Rogers networks are part of excite@home).
;)
If so, will Telus (or whoever it is in your province) leave broadband at $40CDN a month? Are the rumors that they're required by the government to keep it that low really true?
And even more importantly. Do we get to keep our cable modems?
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
The article mentions AT&T being their biggest investor, but I was wondering if this affects AT&T@Home customers as well (namely me)...
I have been a customer of excite for over a year now and have been pleased with what they have to offer.
Of course, here in Oklahoma the bandwidth is plentiful, except right at 5:00pm and for about 30 to 60 minutes thereafter.
I have even been impressed with their technical support. All you have to do is tell level one support things you know they can't comprehend and they bump you right along. Level 2 is pretty proficient in most regards. On to the point of this post....
In my opinion these ISPs are dropping out due to the burden of competing with simpler solutions, ie AOL and the like. Notice I did not say better solutions, just simpler to the average joe schmoe, I don't know a god damn thing about computers. These burdens I speak of is infrastructure. The cost of deploying the connectivity and not being able to convert the AOL magots.
They then tend to get into the pitfall that we need to conquer more areas and that gets them into dept and without a controlled growth rate that they can easily fund themselves they become so overwhelmed in debt that they topple under the load.
Well, my two cents, do with as you will
--Too many holes so little time(You sick bastard!!...I was talking about software!)
I can see it now. Hungry unemployed IT workers lined up at the @homeless shelter.
Ugh. The wolf is @ our door, boys and girls.
I blame it all on people who were stupid enough to buy shares of a company that promised to save consumers money by FedExing a $4.00, 30lb bag of kitty litter across the country. $21 shipping bill later, two day delivery time, versus going to the local bricks-and-mortar pet shop at the local mall, shelling out $6 and having a happy cat right away.
<sarcasm>There's a good business model. How can it fail?</sarcasm>
<more_sarcasm>Now that e-tailers have been brought back to reality and Napster is dead for all practical purposes, there's still no reason for broadband. No need for the convenience and power of having all the world's information at your fingertips. No reason why an AOL dialup account can't satisfy all your surfing needs.</more_sarcasm>
And now, as a result of idiocy of that scale across virtually the entire stock market, I find myself unemployed and unable to find a decent job. This really sucks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
...that @Home's rich crop of spammers just might be to blame for their current troubles?
Think about it: Lots of admins (myself included -- I have LARGE amounts of @Home's IP space in our mailserver's local 'Deny' files) start blocking mail traffic, legitimate or not, from @Home's IP space due to spammer infestations. Personally, with only ONE exception, every single piece of mail I've seen from @Home in the past two years has been spam.
Anyway, @Home users get ticked off because, all of a sudden, they can't mail baby pictures to Aunt Gracie on Orville's Internet Service in Flyspeck, OH. Why? Because Orville's is blocking traffic from @Home. Orville's other users AND admins were complaining about the spam load from @Home, and Orville himself decided to do something about it.
Ticked-off @Home customers bail when @Home can't/won't do anything about their network's spammers. @Home loses revenue. @Home's share price drops. @Home sinks like the Titanic.
At the risk of sounding mean and nasty, I'm not going to cry very much for @Home. Their demise means only one thing to me: Less disk space taken up on my servers due to reduced size of my 'Deny' file.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Cable companies give you the link to the @home backbone, @home gives web access, mail, homepage, startpage, and a stupid browser skin...
Cable companies are doing fine, they'll just need to dump you out onto the web from somewhere else and find you a different email service. Personally, I think what they offered as a start page was revenue generating comercially driven trash. Sales pitches weaved into the headlines like they're something new and all that kind of lame stuff. I'm going to be glad to see them go. this will speed up the opening of cable networks and give options when you sign up for cable modem connnections.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Yes, they truly suck. Their idea of a help center was utter misery. Read this for fun and laughs.
Welcome to the real world. See that? I'm crying. Oh, woe is you. That's called capitalism. That's the "old economy" for you.
Very, very true. And, based on the karma hits I've taken for espousing a Libertarian philosophy, I do want you to understand that I'm not down about that.
The problem is that tech seems to be a bad word now, especially to headhunters. I don't have 14 university degrees; what I have is a practical hands-on ability, honed by 17 years of computer experience, to make systems work in real-world environments.
Have you been to a headhunter lately? It pains me when they're asking for MCSEs. *MCSEs*. I used to have MCSEs under me; they'd ask me questions like why they have to type an IP address to point to a domain name server, or how to prevent HIMEM.SYS loading when the machine starts up. (I've ranted about this on Slashdot before.) It's a paper qualification, not indicative of any real insight into how a Windows machine works. Nor do I even wish to be trapped in the Windows prison. Yet, headhunters seem to want it. [sigh]
Who the hell came up with this "new economy" slogan anyways? Exactly what is so "new" about it? Nothing, other than the fact that a bunch of young, naive idiots managed to convince some old money that their ideas were "foolproof" as in "you fools can't tell we've got no idea what the hell we're doing."Engineering saying: Make something foolproof, and someone comes along and builds a better fool.
But here you are whining about your misfortune. Are you mad you were suckered in too? Are you bitter because you feel it was "owed" to you? Do you think you have it hard? You're probably an intelligent person and you can probably actually perform your job duties.I like to think I'm intelligent. Actually, I did write the Mensa test, and I passed it. Even went to a couple of Mensa meetings, but got bored with hanging around with people who had nothing better to do than attempt to demonstrate to each other how intelligent they are.
No, I didn't get suckered in by the new economy. The problems were evident all the way along. For the most part, it's failing e-tailers that seem to have dragged everything else down. Well, using a mail-order analogy, why would you buy a bag of kitty litter by mail-order when there's a pet store right down the street?
E-tailing, of course, has its merits. Mail order (which is all that e-tailing really is) cannot be beaten as a way of buying specialized items. Antique car parts. Strange transistor types. Even that needlepoint pattern that my best friend's girlfriend has been looking all over for.
In the frucus before the bubble burst, it seemed that people had lost sight of common sense, and we've all been dragged down because of it. I lament *that*, not capitalism.
That alone puts you ahead of most of the other lobos (think lobotomy) "looking" for a job (more accurately, looking for a new job that's exactly like their old job).Well, I'm not looking for something exactly like my old job, no. I'd prefer something where my combination of electronics, computers and technical writing experience can work together to save/make my new employer money. But, at this point, I have a friend who is a tow truck driver, and I've been moonlighting doing that and a few other things to pay the bills.
Maybe try and industry that isn't part of the "new economy."Certainly have. There's no aversion for me to work for a bricks-and-mortar company. I've never worked for a start-up. I've always worked for established companies. That's not to say that I wouldn't love the excitement and pace of a new venture - I would. All the run-off from failed dot-coms are swamping every other sector, and that makes it pretty hard for your signal to rise above the noise and reach the ear of a potential employer.
One of the reasons I've been posting to Slashdot a *lot* lately is to get myself heard by like-minded people who might even be in hiring positions. So far, it's worked reasonably well, I've been getting hundreds of hits a day to my website, and many of those hits check out my resume.
Try civil service. Perhaps the police, fire department, military, IRS, FBI, etc. They're not going away any time soon.I live in Toronto, and I've already done that.
I'm an able-bodied white, anglo-saxon protestant male. WASP. With employment equity in full force across all levels of Canadian government, I submitted my resume, clicked off the boxes asking me my ethnicity and stuff, and received a couple of e-mails back telling me that I didn't reflect the demographics they desired.
If you can't find a job locally, it's time to move. "Oh, I can't move, I love it here." You'll love it too, when you can't pay your rent and you're out on the street.At this point, gladly. Gladly. I live in Toronto, the heart of all of Canada's commerical and industrial activity. Toronto is Canada's equivalent to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit all rolled into one. And it's still pretty dead here. Ottawa is the other option, and it's very similar to Silicon Valley; it's even got the nickname, "Silicon Valley North". With Mitel, Corel, Nortel and innumerable failed start-ups, it's hurting even more than Toronto. So, unless an employer were to see my resume and decide that they wished to sponsor me for immigration into the United States, those are my options, and Toronto is decidedly better than Ottawa at the moment.
Take charge of your life.Of course. I'm motivated almost to the point of obsessiveness about reaching goals.
It's hard to stay optimistic and upbeat when you set a goal of finding a job by the end of the week, and again it doesn't happen.
I've stood at Bay and King (Toronto's equivalent to Wall Street) in my best suit, holding up a sign that says "Computer Geek For Hire.... Will Work For Bandwidth". Because of the humorous and practical approach, I got a lot of attention - even so far as a couple of TV interviews. Got to pass out lots of resumes and follow up with lots of people who gave me business cards.
And from all that, *one* interview. One. I present myself well, and I'm friendly and professional. Needless to say, I didn't get that job. (They were looking for an Assembly language programmer. I haven't written in Assembly in over ten years now.)
Even though I remind myself that it's a numbers game, the truth is that when someone quits a job in the IT department at a bank or something, generally, they don't seem to re-hire.
Computer geeks seem to have become about as desireable as 8-tracks.
You took a chance at (fame and) fortune and you lost. If you don't want to lose, don't play the game.Don't have much choice, do I? Again, I'm not lamenting capitalism. I'm lamenting the idiocy of those who built the tech bubble up so much that when it burst, it affected companies and people with sound business ideas and skills.
You'll never get rich when you're unemployed.Tell me about it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My cousin is a financial analyst at Excite. When I visited her in Redwood City in June, she said they would love to get rid of it, but it they can't give it away, might even have to pay someone to take it. There must be some shutdown costs or it would have been gone long ago. She laughs when she talks about how much @home paid to become excite@home, something like $7.1 Billion (yes, that's thousand million). Worth less than nothing. How's that for making a small fortune?
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.