![]() Of more concern to At Home's owners is the World Wide Web credo that a company must dominate a market or die. "The cable companies, while entrepreneurial, are not necessarily moving at Web pace," Yang said. For as much as the cable companies see At Home as their prodigal son hot rodding around Silicon Valley dreaming of being in show business, to Excite it is a timid Now Jermoluk has to bridge an entirely different culture gap. ![]() "When you talk to the guys who work at At Home, there is almost a cult of T. In Menlo Park, Calif., who served on Excite's board. Yang, a venture capitalist with Institutional Venture Partners has to pull this strange collection of bedfellows into a common team," said Geoffrey Y. "I've been really impressed with the force of will that T. J., has been able to get the board to back his plan, negotiating deals with 21 cable companies to offer its high-speed service. So far, despite the public griping, Jermoluk, known as T. Roberts, president of Comcast, which AT&T just outbid in the takeover battle for another cable company, Mediaone. Michael Armstrong, chairman of AT&T, which recently bought TCI, and Brian L. agreed to back Doerr's plan for high-speed service. Malone, who as chairman of Tele-Communications Inc. John Doerr, the venture capital impresario at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and John C. Looking at its board, it is no wonder one cable executive called it "the Falcon Crest of Silicon Valley." In addition, may be a pawn in its own parents' bickering. The cable companies gave At Home the right to block any other provider from using their systems to offer high-speed Internet access, but that block ends in 2002. Satellite providers the chance to develop rival high-speed technology. So At Home, which once promised to have a million subscribers in its first year, will not reach that milestone until the end of this year, giving phone companies and To add the capability to handle two-way data traffic. Indeed, since At Home was born in 1995, its cable parents - primarily AT&T, the Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications - have done as much to stunt its growth as to nurture it. "The biggest threat to At Home now is themselves," said Abhi Chaki, head of broadband consulting at Jupiter Communications, a market research firm in It does, that is, so long as everybody in the family gets along. Users of Excite and a market value of $18 billion, has as good a chance as any company to be a contender in this new market. And with a potential of 65 million homes served by its cable systems, 26 million current It is a big challenge to take on America Online, which adds some 600,000 paying customers a month and is planning its own high-speed service, through telephone wires.īut the Internet world is changing, with far faster networks soon to be hooked up to computers, televisions and all manner of devices. The all-in-one power of America Online Inc. Jermoluk, formerly head of At Home and now chief executive of His plan is to use fast Internet access to steer users directly to pages run by Excite, replicating That has been the strategy long articulated by Thomas A. ![]() Owner of 58 percent of the voting shares of what is now called Hindery has publicly questioned whether At Home should be so closely tied to a single source of news, e-mail and other services. ![]() Hindery Jr., who runs the cable operations for AT&T, Jermoluk, the company's chief executive, in the Redwood City, Calif., offices.Įxecutives at several of the big cable companies that control the newly combined company are now dropping loud hints that they think the deal, which they approved, was a mistake - most notably, Leo J. ![]() George Bell, left, president of and Thomas A. But Excite may already feel like the bride who finds that her in-laws are bent on undermining the marriage. The country's second-largest Internet portal, which it just bought for $6.7 billion. It is early in the honeymoon for the At Home Corporation, a provider of fast Internet access through cable lines, and Excite Inc., A Hitch to Marital Web Is Often at Odds With Its Cable Parentsīy SAUL HANSELL EDWOOD CITY, Calif. ![]()
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