Women Moving Onto the Web Faster Than Men
Posted by configure on 21 January 2002 - 08:44 · no comments & 147 views
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The Internet research firm said the number of women who surf the Web at home rose 9 percent to 55 million in December from a year earlier, while the total Internet population increased 6 percent to 104.8 million. (I wonder if they surf around NeoWin :P -Ed)
The number of male Web surfers rose 3 percent to 49.8 million.
Women accounted for 52 percent of Internet users at home in December. April 2000 marked the first time more women were on the Web than men, according to Nielsen.
However, Nielsen said male Web surfers at home spent 24 percent more time on the Internet and accessed more content than their female counterparts, averaging 11 hours a month. Women spent about 9 hours online a month.
Separately, Jupiter Media Metrix said that for December it added 34 sites to its list of those that attracted more than 500,000 unique visitors, or people who came to the site at least once during the month.
"A varied and robust list of newcomer Web sites signals continuing and growing demand for online services," said Charles Buchwalter, Jupiter's vice president of media research. "While a few of December's new sites were reflective of the holiday-shopping season, there were a large number of new portals and search sites appealing to targeted communities."
However AOL is highly anxious - as shown in leaked strategy memos last year - at losing its Net franchise. Microsoft has shown every indication that intends to drain the oxygen from future web transactions, and in order to so, wants to squeeze AOL off the PC desktop. AOL has already touted Linux in web appliances and appreciates that a box giving access to AOL content and instant messaging doesn't need to be a Wintel PC.
The trouble is, buying RedHat is the most convoluted and most expensive way of buying such an alternative to Wintel. For example, see Robin Miller's review the $799 OEone Linux PC/appliance. OEone is a modest outfit, but proves that you don't need to own any assets except a little imagination and a few good programmers: the OEone UI is based on Mozilla's XUL toolkit, an asset AOL has helped nurture.
Expensive mergers (and Red Hat would indeed be one, with its $1.6 billion market cap) tend to appeal to the big swinging dicks in corporate planning, and look no further for the likely suspect for this rumour. As the Post's Alec Klein, who wrote the merger story, wrote here in December, ex-AOLer Bob Pittman was passed over for the CEO post in December. This might be his way of showing the AOLers can still punch their weight.
Only of one of those three areas is likely to be attractive to AOL. The other two, if it needs them, can be acquired though partnership, rather than spending cash. AOL is if anything, withdrawing from enterprise business software, with its ownership of the iPlanet venture (the server half of the Netscape acquisition) elapsing in March. Most of the employees were transferred to Sun last year.
Whatever. If this expensive nuptial takes place, it certainly adds a little rebel chic to the AOL-TW Death Star.
But let's not forget boys and girls, that Linux would be serving but one purpose: providing a pipe to AOL-TW's content, TV shows and its news plugs about that content. A survey of US network TV news last year indicated that a third of morning broadcast 'news' stories were promotional features, and 20 per cent of all stories were plugs for the owners' other products (now sourced below). They were, as we saw with the Time front-page splash for the new iMac, thinly-disguised advertorial.
In other words, it may be a Linux computer, but a Linux computer that's solely serving a gigantic information and entertainment congolmerate. And that will be enough to make folk nostalgic for Clippy the Paper Clip.
Remember that for all its vices, Microsoft has next to no media content, and once you're away from your computer, The Beast has very little power to make to your daily cultural intake any more dismal and bland; while that's the entire raison d'etre of the AOL-Time Warner "synergies". We're baffled that anyone should find that absorbing a successful Linux enterprise company to achieve such ends is anything to celebrate. Maybe they should be spending less time with their computers?