Excite@Home CEO George Bell Steps Down

When Excite@Home announced George Bell
would become chief executive in January 2000, the management change looked suspiciously like a reaction to the America Online-Time Warner merger announcement earlier that month.

The AOL and Time Warner announcement pronounced to the world that the future of the Internet lay in content. Investors were giddy about the merger for a whole day before reality hit and the market realized that content companies don't grow revenue at Internet speed.

Still, AOL's competitors, such as Yahoo! and Excite@Home , were left scrambling to figure out how to compete with AOL in the postmerger world. Assuming content was key, no one at Excite@Home seemed better suited to play that game than George Bell, a former documentary producer and Times Mirror executive, to run the company that sells high-speed Internet access and owns the Web portal Excite.

Bell had been CEO of Excite before it merged with the @Home Network in 1999.

But now, the media man is leaving his CEO post at the Redwood City, Calif., company, staying on in the diminished role of president.

Analysts say it's more than likely Excite@Home will select a cable exec to be the new CEO. The company reported a loss of $2.6 billion on revenue of $528 million over the past year. "Someone with cable or AT&T ties would certainly have an edge over other candidates," says UBS Warburg analyst Michael Wallace.

According to industry experts, Excite@Home's relations with AT&T , which owns a 25%
economic stake and a 74% voting stake in Excite@Home, have been slightly rocky. Since January, Excite@Home has brought in several key former AT&T execs, which some speculate may have been a peace offering to the phone giant.

In January, Excite@Home appointed former AT&T executive Byron Smith to senior vice president of marketing, subscriber networks division. Since then, Smith has moved on to become the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of consumer services, which accounts for nearly 70% of the company's total business.

And in February, the company brought in Mark O'Leary to head the Excite@Home @Work division. Not surprisingly, O'Leary was straight off the AT&T boat.

So it goes without saying that appointing an AT&T-friendly CEO could alleviate any existing tensions. Excite@Home spokeswoman Melissa Walia doesn't rule out the possibility of moving an internal executive up. "We're looking both internally and externally. We've established a search committee and are looking at a number of criteria. We're looking at executives from a number of key industries," she says.

And while Bell's appointment was said to signify the importance of Excite@Home's media business, Walia denies his resignation indicates another shift in strategy. "George's move is indicative of the fact that the market opportunity is huge, and the job that needs to be done is larger than one person," Walia says.

But the market seemed to think Bell was pretty capable. On news of his resignation, shares of Excite@Home were down in after-hours trading yesterday, and closed down 5.02% at $15.38.