http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,23827,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh
"WebTV outage strikes again", by Jim Davis
The interesting tidbits are buried towards the middle of this article --
demand for WebTV is definitely up:
According to Perlman, the service now has 400,000 users.
Analysts' most recent estimates had counted some 350,000
customers, and previously the company counted some 250,000
during last year's Christmas selling season. The executive
attributed the growth spurt to finally having enough units
available in retail stores from manufacturers Sony, Philips,
and Mitsubishi.
So, at this pace WebTV is on track to add ~300-350K users in 1998, and will
likely to go over 1 million users in mid-1999. It certainly is poised to
become a significant third major browser, leaving Microsoft with control
over the 2nd and 3rd place browsers. More significantly, I'll bet that
WebTV isn't zero-sum like Navigator/IE market share -- WebTV is expanding
the market. Better yet, WebTV has total control over the portal, hence is a
much better opportunity for rent extraction than traditional browsers.
Cha-ching!
- Jim