Three years in the market. Essentially 20 million registered users, a great brand presence that they've built, a strong reach. We bought a number of years of their efforts at doing that. The value of getting time to market is that getting market share gets harder and harder. So it's not just that it could take us three years to do it, but that three years later it might take you 10 times as much money or six years to do it. If we wanted to build our reach beyond that of our own internal network, we'd have to partner with somebody.

The idea is that if you're an Excite user and you've already personalized your service and that's how you'd like to use it, and I've sent you an e-mail and say, by the way, we have broadband service now in your neighborhood, would you like to have it -- and your personalization and your Excite front end and all that -- you're more likely to do it, so it's tremendous lead generation for us. [Excite's users are] our market. Otherwise I'd have to go find those consumers. I'd pay money like AOL does, $100, $200 or more a sub to acquire them, and for 10 million subs that's a lot of money.

The original backers of @Home were the cable company Tele-Communications Inc. and the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Now that AT&T has bought TCI, they're your biggest shareholder by far. Where does Excite@Home fit in the big scheme of AT&T?

We are the sharp end of the spear for their entry into the world of IP [Internet protocol] technology. Everybody, AT&T included, believes that one day all of the current modes of transmission will become IP. Data is the first [part of it]. Voice will go that way; video will go that way. People argue about the time frame, but I don't think anybody is arguing that all of this won't happen. We're a valuable indicator of where all that's going to go, and how to build that network and integrate all the back-end technologies. People see the consumer side of it, but most of the infrastructure of our company is what has happened to make it work -- the proxy servers, the regional data centers, the backbone, the regional transport centers, the IP provisioning system, the billing system. How do you build all that? That's what our company does.

Leo Hindery, the head of AT&T's Internet operations, has advocated opening Excite@Home's lines to other content companies. The disagreements between you and Hindery have been very public, and the internal debate has hit the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. How did that happen? Is that a good thing?

I fully respect the power of the Fourth Estate and its ability to bring things to light on behalf of consumers. I think it's important to have conversations and show the press where things are going. For a company to operate successfully in our kind of industry, you have to have internal discussions and debates, people expressing different opinions.

You can imagine that in an industry with as much history together as the cable operators have, there are a lot of things they cooperate on and a lot of things they go different ways on. When you come together there's going to be differences of opinion. My job, and the job of @Home, is to maximize the strategies of our partners.

Does that mean you want to negotiate it all in the press? No, and I don't do that. I don't think you'll see many quotes from me on any of this. I'll talk about it in general or philosophical terms. I don't talk about what we talk about inside our company until it's the appropriate time to express our strategy. I feel very strongly that everybody has the right to an opinion, but in the end somebody has the authority to make the decision. Once you make the decision, you're all marching to the same drummer.

Isn't the chief drummer AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong? Aren't you essentially a general in the strategy that Michael Armstrong signs off on?

In the sense that the cable industry as a whole is our chosen partner and AT&T is the largest player in the cable industry, then clearly it's in our best interest to figure out how to be in strategic alignment with their initiatives. That doesn't mean 100 percent alignment. We are not a part of AT&T; we are a public company. We have other constituencies, like Cox and Cablevision and Comcast. AT&T has a dual role: It is a partner, and an owner. We have to work with them as both things. But also they are responsible to us as an owner -- when they are having discussions with us about our strategy, they are also looking at what's best for our company, not just what's right for AT&T. So that works both ways. If we're talking about working out the strategy of our company, my relationship with Mike [Armstrong] is the same as my relationship with [Comcast president] Brian Roberts or any of the others. If we're talking about AT&T then obviously I'm listening to him, because I'm trying to figure out where they're going so I can make sure we're lined up to try to help them.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.