Reason would seem to dictate caution. The highly valued Netscape makes browsers that whisk you through cyberspace; it’s like Ford or GM. Yahoo! and Excite are more like road maps. It’s nice to be Rand McNally, but most people pick up whatever’s on the gas-station rack. Of the two contenders, the better-known Yahoo! is associated with youth; last week it introduced a kid-based variation called Yahooligans! Excite boasts that its Web-site reviewers have actually seen the inside of newsrooms.
Competition will come from everywhere. Watch for big media names to get in on the act (Rupert Murdoch is already there with iGuide). And no one knows whether there are enough ads to support all these online ventures.
But cold calculations won’t determine the price of the upstarts. Greed will. The buzz is that the next set of “10-baggers”–venture-capital jargon for companies returning 1,000 percent on investment–will come from Internet content firms. On the day of the stock offering, newly enriched execs at both companies might well be screaming, “Yahoo!”
