Mobilestar Less Mobile; Excite@Home Less Exciting

jc1 writes: "MobileStar, provider of 802.11b wireless LAN connectivity throughout 500 of the USA's Starbucks cafes, has laid off 88 of its staff, which a source described as "everybody". With the demise in August of Metricom's Ricochet service, one is left to wonder if there is a business to be made in providing public wireless Internet services." Or any broadband internet access at all - Excite@Home, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, has stopped taking any new orders.

Comments

Excite@Home - who needs it?

[Animats]

It was never clear what value Excite@Home added. The cable company provides the infrastructure for cable modems, and some backbone provider provides the long-haul portion of the service. Excite@Home was supposed to compete with AOL's "content", or at least that was the hype a year or two ago. Apparently they also did tech support for cable services, badly. So, no great loss.

I live near Excite@Home HQ. I await the furniture auction; they had good furniture.

Re:Hard times for Linux-friendly ISP's

[Fencepost]

Worldnet is an option, though they don't make it easy to sign up without their software. Dig around on www.wurd.com to find a link to a completely web-based signup page.

Restrictions:

• must explicitly enable Internet access to email via the web-based configuration if you're retrieving from outside their dialups;
• must use SSL tunneling to the mail server for the same;
• outbound SMTP is blocked, but the block can be removed by request after the account's been active for 30 days;
• Can't get the el-cheapo accounts, which require an ad banner while you're connected anyway.

Bad Execution, not bad tech or biz models

[n9fzx]

Many businesses are now failing, not because of bad technology or bad business models, but because of poor execution. Startups are particularly beholden to their early investors, and all of the VCs were heavily pushing "land grab" business practices throughout the bubble. The reason is obvious: Stocks were valued primarily on audience, and if you want the best quick return on your investment, you demand practices that build audience share, period. Early investors don't care about long term prospects for a business, they just want a quick cash-out to flip into something else. The 1997 changes in post IPO-lockout (from two years to six months) only magnified the short term focus. Having structured the business with that bias, the result is inevitable.

Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons, many of which are completely out of control of the management or techs. Don't dismiss an idea just because somebody screwed the pooch in the past.

Re:They didn't "need" a T1...

[eggboard]

You're completely right, but the deal MobileStar struck with Starbucks to get access to their stores was to install T1 lines in *every* facility they went into at their (MobileStar's) expense. This always seemed too generous to me. Starbucks wanted a corporate network; MobileStar wanted to use Starbucks to leverage a national deployment. The money just wasn't there, nor would the revenue ever meet the probably $200 million ticket for deployment. (They burned through about $100 million, I believe.)

Re:The secret

[blair1q]

You're comparing two utterly different business models.

A cable drop costs about a thousand bucks to install (with equipment), and you get $30 per month, every month, for years. Have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily dropping their broadband connection to go back to DSL or analog speeds? I sure haven't.

A corvette costs about $25,000 to produce and you only get to sell it once.

But, if your drops are crappy and your customers are stupid, you spend that $30 and more on repairs and handholding. And you've got the cable companies (known mother-rapers) as middlemen hocking you for a bigger piece and screwing up customer service even more out of spite. This was @home's problem. Excite's problem was that they believed their own hype and market cap and did some supremely stupid things insted of doing due diligence and trying to make a business.

$1300/mo for a T1 line is insanely overpriced (the phone companies are antediluvian retards). $30/mo for a cable line is insanely underpriced. $50/mo or so is the residential ballpark, $200/mo for businesses.

--Blair

Re:P2P No not peer to peer

[TekPolitik]

I'm sorry, but this is bollocks. A good CEO, and a well structured marketing plan backed by a focussed department (no matter how big or small) is VITAL to the success of these companies.

I'm pretty sure the original poster was referring to the value of marketing to the economy, not its value to the company. Marketing has negative value to the economy because those who participate in it produce nothing of value - they merely try to persuade others to choose their employer's thing of value over somebody else's thing of value.

Theories that try to suggest that marketing has positive value to the economy appear to operate based on an assumption that nobody will by any of the things they need without marketing being there to tell them what they need. In other words, they assume people are too stupid to figure out what they need and then go buy it. Such theories are fundamentally unsupportable.

If marketing were not to exist at all, things of value would still be produced, at a lower price (due to the drop in overhead from marketing). What's more, those currently putting their efforts into marketing would be forced to gain employment producing things, so more would be produced, generating more tangible wealth for everybody.

Marketing is one of the known defects of a competitive market - the attempt to alter the supply and demand aspects of a product not by alteration of the price or quality, but by creating a perception of difference, and when one competitor does it, the others are forced to.