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@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Feb 28, 2002 11:59 PM
from the rule-out-reliability-as-a-suspect dept.
from the rule-out-reliability-as-a-suspect dept.
bofus writes: "This article from CNet points to AT&T taking over the @Home board as the nail in the coffin for @Home. It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there."
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I did the same thing (Score:2)
Hmm.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm.. (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously you never discovered why the dot-com business took off so well...
...er, nevermind.
Re:Hmm.. (Score:2)
While I don't doubt that this will provide entertainment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heducation for an entire generation of MBAs, I don't think it's beyond the grasp of the average beginning accounting student. Or, for that matter, someone who has never had accounting but understands a balance sheet and cash flow.
What I know... (Score:4, Interesting)
I never understood the point of the @Home network, it seemed needlessly redundant. Some people complain that attbi service is slower, but I still seem to get good speeds.
For reference, check this screenshot out of a speed test:
http://www.whichwayup.org/images/leet.gif
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
I'm not complaining, though. I'm happy with my service, and they did an amazing job swapping us over to the new ISP in record time.
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
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@Home's initial business model was driven in large part by John Malone and TCI. @Home ran a PC-oriented high-speed IP service on top of the cable companies' local fiber and coax networks. @Home ran the business, owned the high-speed customer, and sent money back to TCI (and other cable companies that they signed up). When the cable companies found that there were more things that they wanted to do with IP than just sell bandwidth to PC owners (advanced set-top boxes and voice-over-IP are two), @Home was quite uncooperative about it. Pissing off the companies whose wires you depend on is not a smart thing to do.
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@Home decided that they were going to be a content company moreso than a transport company. They paid insanely high prices for Excite (a portal with not that much of its own content) and Blue Mountain Arts (free online greeting cards) among others. When the dot-com bubble collapsed, @Home suffered the same staggering losses that took down many other companies.
Note the actions of large cable companies other than TCI/AT&T-- Time Warner and MediaOne created RoadRunner, and kept tight control of it so they could do what they wanted on the IP network. Comcast and Cox gave @Home notice that they would be withdrawing and operating their own IP networks well before it became obvious that @Home was in a death spiral.To summarize, @Home ignored the fact that they needed to make themselves a valuable partner for the cable companies, not an adversary. And in my opinion, they made some really bad choices about content versus transport.
ahaha! (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, he was actually good at it?
Who killed @Home? (Score:5, Funny)
Back and to the left...
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:2)
FBI Agent: 'Are you trying to stall us, or are you just senile?'
Grandpa: 'A little from column "A", a little from column "B".
----
Me: Just remember... 'Futurama' is gone, 'Family Guy' is gone, but 'King of the Hill' is still going strong. What the hell is wrong with the world?
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:2)
Campus networks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Campus networks (Score:2)
Lea
I live very close to @Home.... (Score:4, Interesting)
it was me, sorry. (Score:5, Funny)
@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home?
Sorry, it was me, I didn't realize that letting my monthly payment slip a few weeks would have such a big impact on the company. I really feel bad about it though.
What really killed @Home... (Score:5, Insightful)
On every PC where at @Home software install was done, the home page was set up to a custom, VERY high-bandwidth portal site. It had daily movies, ridiculously sized graphics, and tons of customization. And no one ever used it fully!! It was difficult to navigate, and had an ugly interface.
So every time a person opened up their browser, poof, they were force-fed a ton of high-bandwidth info that they didn't want. Combine the delivery costs with the costs of maintaining that content, and you have millions of dollars down the drain. Those millions could have saved them in the long run, IMHO.
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:2)
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:2)
Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2, Flamebait)
I'm not interested in Quake 3. There's no "streaming media" or whatever it's called on the Internet I can find that I can't just watch on TV. All I need the 'net for is e-mail, looking up the occasional website, and maybe talking to some friends on ICQ. This is what killed @home, and what is slowly cutting away the margins of the few remaining broadband companies. There are too many players in a field we consumers just aren't interested in, and the market can't support it. The "broadband revolution" is a fluke, just like the Internet Appliance hubbub a few years ago.
I might look into getting a cable internet connection in a few years, when a "killer app" comes out that makes it worth my time and money; right now, I just can't see why anybody other than a pasty-faced computer dork would need broadband.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:5, Interesting)
After switching to broadband, I simply can't go back to dialup access. I've been forced to use or test it occasionally, and even the most trivial web surfing seems painfully slow. It's like being used to a remote control on a tv for fast channel switching and having to go up to the tv each time you want to change the channel. You get used to it, and all these things combined make it worth the price.
Parent
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2, Funny)
When I would dial up, I would have the strangest sense that I absolutely had to get done what I was doing, ignoring the kids and wife. I just couldn't stand disconnecting and then redialing later. Now I don't mind if I get interrupted for any reason at
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
IF you spend any amount of time using the 'net, you need broadband.
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
Research: 100
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
It's no more correct to say that all consumers don't need broadband than it is to say that all true Americans are christians.
Parent
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2)
Anyone who says speed isnt needed is smoking crack. I could make a bullet list and pretend I knew what I was talking about too. But the fact is, SLOW LINK = SLOW DOWNLOAD. My time and enjoyment is worth money. Maybe you want to surf at 56K (ha, if..) and wait minutes for pages to load, and get your ass kicked at RTCW or MOHAA. Myself, I need the speed, I use the bandwidth for content I create (Family Photos etc..), VOIP, Multiple people in the house surfing at once, and many more uses than I should even have to list.
@Home died because it was controlled by Control freaks. They strangeled it, they tortured it, they gave it away cheap, they abused thier customers, they took the money and ran.
Offer the customers what they want, not what you want to give them. Its not a damn monopoly, took them a while to learn it.
No, your conceptions of "average" are off. (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, because my budget for christmas shopping isn't $2000, it's more like $200 -- i.e. Amazon.com, not Macy's.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day.
If you're involved in academics or publishing in any way, *everything* is done via e-mail. You get papers, chapters, invoices, complaints, and everything else via e-mail. Busy people use e-mail. If you don't use a lot of e-mail, you must not have to deal with very many busy people. I've got friends in corporate america (no, not technology) who get twice as much e-mail as me. They e-mail at their desk, on their cell phone, on their blackberry, in their living room, and in their bathroom on their Palm, and they're not even in technology.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two
You certainly can't get most academic journals at a library, even a university library usually only carries a small subset of them. You certainly won't find any articles from such journals on the net through Google. The only way to get scientific research (no, not the NBC article on the research, the actual research) is to either pay for the journal ($$$$$$$) or pay for a membership to an online database which carries the journal (only $$$$)... But even with the membership, the papers are provided in
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
What exactly makes you average over me? I have two little sisters (out of a total of four) still living with my parents. These two (with their friends) download at least 2-4 game demos a month and play them all the way through, I understand. I don't game very much but they apparently do, and they're girls, 13 and 16 with N'Sync and Dragonball Z posters on their walls. I didn't teach them where to get game demos, I don't even know! Of course, I do download Linux...
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority.
Woah. As I said, I depend on the Internet to: 1) save me money when I shop, 2) talk to bosses and colleagues via e-mail, 3) get academic research or other content-rich information (not just Google-searching) and 4) get free software whenever I can. Same as everyone else in the college world and many people in the non-college world.
Ever think maybe you're a little behind the curve of what "average" is?
Parent
Re:You missed my point. (Score:3, Funny)
I don't DO any of those things, and neither do most of my friends. Put yourself in an average agorophobic person's shoes, and think about what you just said:
Shopping: 20 minutes of driving to the mall via car == 6 hours walking.
Why would your average person drive all the way to the mall when there are plenty of convenience stores within walking distance, and you can pretty much order anything by catalog anyway? You can't underestimate the importance of exercise, something which driving will never be able to replicate.
Mail use: 15 minutes to drive to the post office, 4 hours walking.
Why would I ever go to the post office? If something gets shipped to me and I miss it, I'll just do a chargeback on my credit card and let FedX try to deliver it again.
Research: 10 minutes to drive to the library == 3 hours to walk there, 4 hours to walk back with an armload of books.
Once again, I would probably just make up facts like every other respectable college student before I tried to drive to a library. I mean, who does their research in a library? And who needs to do research anyway? Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.
Please realize that people like you who depend on your cars for everything are a minority. There is a market for big bloated SUVs in your demographic, sure, but my point was that this demographic wants to jog around until their feet bleed more than GM thinks, and it is market forces that killed the Pinto.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2)
TV?
Oh, you mean that thing with commericals. . .
I got spoiled by online video before I even got broadband.
Then again if you are the braindead idiototic type who can sit in front of a TV screen and let your brain slowly ooze outside of your head, then so be it.
(this, by the way folks, is where the sterotypes about females and computing come from. Ignoring that it is a troll, the last line insulting nerds is not a good thing. I am not pasty faced, though I do aim for it.
I know who did it (Score:2, Funny)
It was Colonel Mustard with a candle in the library. Duh.
Great Questions. No Answers. (Score:4, Insightful)
On the plus side, this article has some thorough reporting. Which is a nice departure from the press-release driven slop CNET usually dishes: "AMD announced its high end end processor will jump from 2.3 to 2.4 GHz."
On the down side, there's no attempt at analysis. All we know is Eslambolchi might have donated HIV infected blood to a terribly wounded company. In the short term, @Home clearly benefited from his expertise. But his tenure might have destroyed the company.
This was a good article because it raised some important questions. A great article would have provided answers.
Not@home (Score:2)
tcd004
@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:5, Informative)
You dump a few billion dollars into a nationwide network, and then you convince every cable television provider you can shake a stick at that broadband internet is within their grasp, and that you'll help them deploy it by being their internet access point. You get a few hundred cable systems online, and all is good. You get 50% of their profits for providing the bandwidth, and they are happy because they've found a new source of revenue.
Your market share continues to rise as your cable systems count skyrockets past the thousands. Everything is great! But then it happens. Being that cable systems are greedy bastards, they start eyeing up your 50% of the profits. Then, the guy in their NOC that actually had the cluestick long enough to set up the whole damn headend for broadband internet has an idea. Why don't we just drop @Home and get our bandwidth from the local telcos? After all, DS3's from Chicago cost thousands more than DS3's from the Bell office down the street.
And one by one, every cable system that @Home helped set up, went independant. I worked in the cable industry at the time, and I saw it coming from a mile away. Hell, I watched the DS3 from @Home go dead. I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
But it gets better. @Home wasn't stupid. They knew that cable providers would eventually catch on. So they made lengthy contract with them. The problem is, the contracts ended up benig too market specific. For months, we supported both @Home, and our proprietary network. All new markets going live with broadband internet wouldn't even know what @Home was, as we only offered our proprietary network in new markets.
Eventually, we bought out the remainder of the @Home contract. @Home was stupid as all hell to let that happen too. That market's size has more than doubled in the past year. They would have been rolling in it. But then again, I supposed that when you're billions in debt, lump sums of cash can sure be appealing to your accountants as they try to fend off the lenders.
Making a long story short, @Home's demise had little to do with their network, and everything to do with unrenewed/prematurely-ended contracts. @Home's network was incredibly fast. Surprised the hell out of our network engineer at several times. But, you just can't run a business when you're not generating revenue.
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:5, Interesting)
Cable companies paid @Home $13.00 a subscriber
@Home didn't build anything
@Home's contracts were for being part of the @Home franchise. {still recogonizable} and for their hosting e-mail and web space. thats it.
In all actualily
When you throw on top of that Beer-Day Fridays, free massages, and the Sucking black hole which is Excite.com, thats where the $$ went
Once Excite came online, those vampires sucked @Home for every penny. I had to deal with no less than FOUR account reps once a week for about 3 months just to sync up our local market homepage 'headlines' with their main page. Thats a lot of wasted man hours that could have been avoided with 1 simple statement.
[Did I mention there was a slide in the main office, made it easier to get downstairs on Beer-Day Friday]
Parent
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you captain obvious! (Score:2)
BlackGriffen
P.S. It's sad that the analysts can't see the obvious. I, myself, always wondered what the hell Excite@home had to do with anything since AT&T was an ISP, too, and could profit more by just keeping the customers to themselves. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner, but if you lose your contracts...
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:2)
Depending on when you found out as opposed to when it was made public couldn't this be considered insider trading?
We'll make it our little secret;)
One word... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One word... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only, whoops, AT&T wasn't bluffing! "Sorry, guys, we've got our own network; we don't need you anymore. Have fun in bankruptcy court." And everyone else soon followed suit. I bet that three hundred million AT&T was offering would look mighty good to those bondholders about now . . .
Long time coming. (Score:2, Funny)
Step 2: Get caught up in dot com mania. Spend 6 billion on dot com in search of a business model.
Step 3: Spend a few years trying to recover from step 2.
Step 4: Chapter 11
To dispell some unfounded thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
@home started up the service and contracted out to cable companies
we all know this
problem was the cable companies were pretty money grubbing...in fact @home only got between 25 and 30 percent of profits per subscriber (not the 50% that one person noted) and because @home was losing money from this, they attempted to get the cable companies to alot them 50% of the profits, which halfway happened...they get maybe 40-45 in the end...and the cable companies decided to hike their prices to make even more money (none of them would've been losing any profits by keeping prices the same but they tried to put it off as only @home hiking the prices...bs)
Att actually built up their network before the contract crisis began and didnt tell anyone (I cannot tell you how I know this for I get killed =] ) and when they knew beforehand that they were already going to cancel their @home contract...or end up buying them. Att opted out as we know, but @home managed to keep contracts with some of the remaining larger contracts. These were to be extended for a short time period but there was too much money to be lost and @home had to just cancel it all. All the money was gone. The reason @home died was almost entirely because the cable providers refused to pay the money to keep the service connected through their lines, and it would've been too expensive of a venture to run the lines themselves.
Re:To dispell some unfounded thoughts (Score:3)
My cable provider, Shaw [www.shaw.ca] starting building thier own netowrk at least a year before @Home ran into trouble. Thier transition was a lot simpler for people, they already had moved many of thier customers when the Chapter 11 was filed.
While I don't doubt that greed played a part in thier move, I think they were mostly embarassed. I can recall a 6 month period when you couldn't pay Everquest from 9:30pm till 1:00 am, one of @Home's router on the west cost crapped out on schedule, Every Night. Other network outages and strange behaviour were common, news servers were useless and email just vanished on a regular basis. If you tried to send someone in the Calgary tech community an email and they didn't recive it for 2 days, or it just disapeared nobody was surprised. I was on the phone with a recruiter one day who should have recived my resume a couple days previously, she was wondering where it was. All I had to say was @Home, she just said, "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, do you have Hotmail?"
I don't think it was any wonder at all that Shaw decided not to renew.
The Leader in Broadband (Score:4, Funny)
Excite@Home
The Leader in Broadband
Then right below that it says:
Excite@Home Reduces workforce as operations wind down.
Now this is a company with some intelligence! Maybe they should instead put up a black band (of mourning) like on be.com [be.com]...
Idiots... (Score:2)
Parts if not all are probably redundant ... (Score:3, Informative)
1) Overspending. They thought there stock would go to 1000000. Spend, Spend, Spend.
2) Excite. 6 BILLION!!! in cash and stock swap. OBTW, Excite was sold off a few months ago for $175,000
3) AT&T YES
Hey, for what its worth @Home was great. I will be honest, I had the service for 4-5 years and ALWAYS had a static IP address (though they liked changing it around now and then). Service was always up, and could do whatever I wanted.
Well as we know times are changing, but if anything, from the way things look, I am happy to be a Cox customer then any of the others.
I blame their useless Abuse department. (Score:2)
I got a handful of Acceptable Use Policy violation notices from @Home for messages I had posted to Usenet, and even had my service cut off completely once. All this despite the fact that I was complying with the posting guidelines in the relevant newsgroups.
@Home made no effort to check the validity of the claims against me. They (both the complainant and @Home) said I was "spamming and disrupting the group", even though I was doing neither.
The kicker is that I didn't even receive notice of these violations until my pipe got shut off, because they emailed the notices to an email address THAT DIDN'T EXIST. My username was (mumblemumble)1@home.com, they sent them to (mumblemumble)2@home.com, an account I never created. They apparently created it FOR me after the first message bounced, I guess -- later on I was able to log into the POP server using that account name and get my mail.
Horrible, horrible, unfair behavior.
Re:Possible reason (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Possible reason (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for a CMTS vendor for almost five years, and every contact with @Home was an exercise in insanity.
1: We were installing gear at an @Home site, and needed changes in the routing made to light up the new gear. Called the NOC a dozen times over the two days I was onsite with no response. I finally turned off one of the (redundant) power supplies on the @Home 7200 in the headend. Sure enough, the NOC called us within a minute. I had the guy who called find the Routing Diva (that's what her card said!) before I turned the supply back on.
2: They were constantly beating us up to make sure that the modems wouldn't bind to IP addresses learned from ARP, since then you could just statically configure an IP address you wanted to steal. No, they insisted that we sniff DHCP, that way their magical DHCP-integrated-with-billing server could be authoritative. We actually preferred using DHCP to ARP (since we had to relay DHCP anyway) and added a switch to disable learning from ARP. So far so good, except that their DHCP implementation was non-standard. It completely ignored giaddr, and assigned the IP based on client ID. (That caused countless other problems, as you might imagine...) Fine, except that the Client ID was also the hostname in @Home's DNS.
For those of you who lack a devious mind, this means that all you had to do was a reverse lookup on the address you wanted to steal, enter that as your client ID, and the DHCP would assign you the address you stole.
Parent
Re:Possible reason (Score:2)
Re:well duh (Score:2)
But more to the point, why is everyone here being so quick to condemn this guy. While I agree it is an odd situation, this is a pretty serious charge, and I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Basically, I think that @Home were idiots. They made some really bad business decisions (Excite). Their cable partner contracts were poorly done, leaving them at a huge disadvantage when negotiating contract renewals. The "new economy" was crashing down around their ears, cutting into new subscriber rates, and DSL was aquiring a reputation for much better quality of service. AT&T gave them a not unreasonable buy out bid, but the @Home bondholders refused to accept that distressed assets sell at bargain prices. AT&T took their ball and went home, and @Home got nothing.
On the other hand, it is almost laughable to consider the possibility tht AT&T needed to spy on the fragile and unreliable @Home infrastructure to figure out how to make a nationwide network.
Re:...and not with their incompetence, huh? (Score:2)