H&R Block finally found a fitting suitor for CompuServe Corp. this month. WorldCom Inc., a Jackson, Miss.-based telephone company, paid H&R Block $1.2 billion in stock for its controlling stake in CompuServe. Not quite a household name, WorldCom has nevertheless been slowly building up an impressive arsenal of Internet and networking technology. Last year, the company purchased MFS Communications, a local telephone company, for $14.4 billion. MFS had just purchased UUNet Technologies Inc., which was the first commercial Internet service provider and operates one of this country's major Internet backbones. Ironically, UUNet is expanding its high-performance network infrastructure in part through an agreement with none other than CompuServe's arch rival Microsoft.
So what does WorldCom intend to do with its latest acquisition? First, the company plans to keep CompuServe's Network Services division, which has 1,200 corporate customers. The company will transfer $175 million in cash and the remaining 2.6 million consumer customers in CompuServe's Interactive Services Division to America Online (AOL). Additionally, WorldCom has agreed to acquire AOL's high-speed Internet access division, ANS Communications Inc. In return, AOL will sign a five-year contract under which WorldCom becomes AOL's largest network service provider.
The news caused quite a stir among CompuServe's customers, many of whom are as loyal to their 28-year-old service provider as Mac users are to Apple Computer. While AOL is known for celebrity chats, network outages, and deluges of junk email, CompuServe has for the most part remained hard-core, providing utilitarian information and reliable service to its loyal users. Thomas E. Weber of the Wall Street Journal described the difference between the two online services, "Think of CompuServe playing Brooks Brothers to AOL's Gap."
AOL chairman Steve Case tried to assure the public that his company had no plans to "AOL-ize" CompuServe, saying that CompuServe would remain an independent entity from AOL. Case also stated that users wouldn't have to change their email addresses and they wouldn't face a rate hike. Finally, Case promised that AOL wouldn't borrow CompuServe resources to help fix its ongoing network capacity woes. In fact, AOL will use additional capacity from WorldCom.
The implications of this move are two-fold. WorldCom establishes a major networking and online presence, serving the two largest commercial online services and thousands of corporate customers. AOL gets a boost in membership (it will have six times that of the Microsoft Network), a much-needed cash infusion, and through its alliance with WorldCom, it hopes to be able to resolve its network capacity problems once and for all.
Only months after the company enthusiastically demonstrated its slimmed-down NetPC desktop machine, IBM has announced that it is backing out of the NetPC market entirely. IBM cites lack of customer demand, and I can't help but agree. Even if people only use one-tenth of the power of their PCs, you just aren't going to see them willingly give up the other 90 percent. Americans rarely relinquish power once they're given it -- witness the continued congestion of freeways while half-filled commuter trains whiz past on the sidelines.
IBM's change in plans makes me wonder if it wasn't all mere posturing straight from the beginning, nothing more than a summer squirt-gun battle between neighborhood toughs Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. As most of you will recall, Microsoft and Intel rushed to develop the NetPC concept in reaction to all the hype around Oracle's Network Computer. Is the NetPC/NC move a flash in the pan that won't materialize? Are slimmed-down computers fated to go the way of the solar-powered, one-seater mini-car? We shall see.
Last September, the OLAP Council released the OLAP Multidimensional API (MD-API version 0.5), the first multivendor interface specification for accessing and managing multidimensional views of data from OLAP data sources. The API was public and nonproprietary, as the OLAP Council is a not-for-profit association of vendors of multidimensional database clients and related software.
This month, Microsoft Corp. drove right over the OLAP Council's efforts by releasing the beta specification of its own new set of APIs, OLE DB for OLAP. Code-named "Tensor," this development project is designed to link multidimensional data providers and consumers, regardless of location or type. The API already has the backing of several major software vendors and application developers; it can only be expected to be widely adopted as have all previous Microsoft releases. If you want to implement the API, you must download both the OLE DB software development kit and OLE DB for OLAP specification, both of which are located at Microsoft's Web site, www.microsoft.com.
An interesting marriage occurred between Unidata, a $50 million relational database software company that has traditionally helped move legacy applications to client/server environments, and object database vendor O2 Technology Inc. The resulting combined entity, which will retain the Unidata corporate name, will focus on delivering advanced object-oriented database management and application development software and services, directly and through resellers. O2 CEO and founder Franýois Bancilhon will become chief technology officer at Unidata and will join the Unidata Board of Directors.