Scott Kessler Quotations

The point is that Yahoo continues to invest very, very significantly in this area, and is doing good things, and will continue to do good things, which steps up the pressure.

MSN was the one that may have been a logical acquiring company but they are clearly building as opposed to buying,

More detail to allow analysts to better understand and engage in forecasting would be great. There's a grey area where they're not providing guidance, but they can give us more information.

I can't imagine that Microsoft would be worried as a result of this. On the other hand, it's something that probably has attracted their interest.

For some time now Western Union has been the crown jewel of this company.

I think a lot of people are rationalizing the fourth quarter as a one-time tax hit. I don't agree. This indicates the company's need to focus on and invest in its ability to more effectively forecast, manage and execute its international operations.

I think a lot of folks who were at that meeting felt pretty chagrined, I would argue this is still pretty material information, given the high profile nature of this company and the emergence of click fraud as a high-profile subject.

I think that you can, as a company, be very, very focused on the long term, while also providing helpful and detailed information to the investment community on a recurring basis. And I think that is ultimately what one of the company's goals has to be for 2006.

People are ready and able to pay for such services. For free isn't always the case anymore.

It has been a difficult company to track. If the name hasn't changed, the business has changed. There's been a bunch of different acquisitions and divestitures. It's a more challenging company to cover and follow as an investor.

The question is what becomes of the remaining businesses, which are clearly quite weak.

The deal shows the importance of search ads for AOL. Search has been and will be the biggest category of online ads.

There are a lot of things that they are doing behind the scenes that analysts aren't privy to. It's not only that they don't provide guidance and information, it's that sometimes they're not so responsive to questions.

With eBay, you don't have to sit around and wonder what IT spending is going to look like or where the semiconductor cycle is, ... In some ways, it's a counter cyclical stock because both sellers and buyers will have more of a reason to transact when the economy isn't as good, since consumers may have a need to raise extra cash or buy used merchandise.

Essentially, the company has decided to divest itself of its, by far, most successful and most prized business, and it's going to retain two businesses that I consider challenged at this point.

There's a fair amount of concern about how the company is going about executing on its communications with the investing public.

They seized upon an opportunity and they succeeded at pricing a pretty sizeable offering. That's a price that doesn't seem far from what would be considered reasonable.

This is a $100 billion publicly traded company with tens of thousands of shareholders. Clearly you have a lot of shareholders that have so far taken a backseat to people who casually happen upon the Web site.

A lot of these companies look at AOL as an entity that has huge traffic, a substantial number of users, a fair amount of subscribers and access to unique and differentiated content and services, ... Right now, it is very prized real estate when it comes to the Internet, particularly because its valuation may be depressed since it is in the midst of an ongoing turnaround, and part of a large conglomerate.

It was bound to happen. It was just a matter of when.

It was just a matter of time before there was some consolidation of these gains.

It was just a matter of time before the expectations exceeded the results.

That's a substantial beat when it comes to the second quarter, but the expectations were just way, way too high.

Clearly these three companies are becoming increasingly competitive vis-a-vis EBay, and the thought is maybe EBay would want to respond with a defensive move.

This is one of those stocks where it appears pretty obvious that people will buy it based on the company's fundamentals and are not going to pay a heck of a lot of attention to valuation,

The future of these two companies is bright. There are growth opportunities not just here in the U.S. but internationally. The companies are not going away anytime soon, notwithstanding any near-term fluctuation in the stocks.

The company has not adequately invested in investor relations during the past couple of years. It's pretty obvious.