By Nick Patience
Compaq Computer Corp chief executive Eckhard Pfeiffer was on hand at the press conference in New York to bid farewell to fledgling AltaVista Co internet business and said the company decided to spin it out because the agile internet business model was so different to the computer hardware business, plus it will also provide better value for Compaq’s all-important shareholders. He also rolled out a long list of mostly unprovable and somewhat questionable ‘facts’ about Compaq’s existing role in the internet world, claiming it was the number one supplier of systems to ISPs – even with DEC’s Alpha this has to be a bold claim – and that four out of five of the most visited web sites use Compaq’s machines, which is probably true to some extent, but largely meaningless. What is probably true is his claim that about one quarter of all internet traffic passes through the DEC Palo Alto exchange. By 2002 Pfeiffer reckons the internet content and service market will be larger than the entire PC market, and worth some $170bn. Although new AltaVista CEO Rod Schrock claims that revenues, and not page views or audience reach will matter in the AltaVista business model, Compaq, which will continue to have a very close relationship to the company even after it goes public, is trying some very old-school, hammer-to-crack-a-nut techniques to drive traffic to AltaVista. Since January 9, all its Presario home PCs have shipped with a so-called internet keyboard, which includes various hot buttons, one of which takes users to a ‘My AltaVista’ site that will later be opened to the entire web. Until that date users of the internet keyboards were sent to My Yahoo! when they hit the button and Compaq claims that 95% of users have at least tried My AltaVista since the changeover, which is hardly surprising. Compaq thinks this is such a good idea that it extending the internet keyboard model to ship with all its business-oriented PCs later this year. Despite Compaq positioning AltaVista as the search engine ad portal for savvy and highly- educated users, this seems like a heavy-handed approach to apply to the perhaps even more-savvy business users who are used to using bookmarks and are not afraid to type URLs in the browser’s location bar. Compaq officials told us after the event yesterday that the hot keys on the internet keyboards included with the Prosignia and other lines may well take users to a different page than My AltaVista, and they will also be configurable by users.
