When will Excite finally be voted off Portal Island? When it happens, don’t expect the event to be televised.

This thing is really dragging out. When will AT&T, the principal shareholder of Excite@Home, finally finish the job of shutting down the "media division"?

To write a eulogy for a business that hasn't yet been shut down may be slightly insensitive. Those who will be looking for jobs elsewhere when the other shoe finally drops probably would rather not hear that they are long overdue for the gallows.

But these were portal wars, after all. To the victors go the spoils: a mass consumer audience and a diversified revenue base. The losers, we always knew, would be rewarded with bankruptcy. Mergers, acquisitions, and dealmaking can paper over the actual fact of bankrupcty, but the principle is the same.

Plenty of pundits - evidently they won't be seeking medals for tact - have written off Yahoo, a much healthier business than Excite. Jim Cramer scoffed that Yahoo has proven itself to be "a friend, not a business." Dana Blankenhorn recently wrote a column entitled "Yahoo: Game Over." I guess I'll be forgiven, then, for the Agatha-Christie-like plot of this week's instalment.

When Excite dies, parts of it will be sold off - oh, not for anywhere near as much as they were "worth" two years ago - but not for nothing, either. Blue Mountain online greeting cards will fetch a decent price. Traffic to Excite's sites is worth something, too.

Not so long ago, Excite was the #2 portal in the emerging portal race led by the space definer, Yahoo. When Yahoo zigged, Excite zigged too, just not quite as skilfully. Being #2 to Yahoo wasn't so bad. But as we know, nothing stood still for long in the dot com biz. MSN and AOL powered forward, leaving Excite to duke it out for the #4 spot with Lycos, which, like Excite, had acquired a hefty portfolio of highly-trafficked dot com properties like Angelfire, Tripod, Hotbot, Quote.com, and many others. The strange thing about Lycos is that it's still doing this acquisition thing, recently picking up Raging Bull in an AltaVista (the UnPortal) fire sale.

Some may say that Excite's decline began in earnest when it merged with @Home, a company whose main line of business is to facilitate the provision of high speed Internet access by cable companies. Maybe so. Infoseek’s brand was submerged and its technology ignored after being acquired by Disney Internet Group; Snap and Xoom fizzled under the ownership of NBC Internet. DIG and NBCi are no more; and nothing is left of the majority of their component parts.

Why wouldn't the same thing happen to Excite as happened to the other portal also-rans? If Excite had had the good fortune to be acquired by a still-net-crazy telecom, as Lycos did (Terra Lycos has a bundle of cash in the bank, and is not backing down from operating Lycos as a serious business), or had it been able to maintain its grip on the perilous-but-viable #4 position in the race for portal supremacy, Excite might now have a future.

It must be a helpless feeling to be one of the remaining employees of the media division of ExciteAtHome, knowing that their bosses’ bosses are evaluating their options and knowing that no amount of short-term "success" in moving somewhere close to profitability is likely to affect the ultimate outcome. Outgoing CEO George Bell strongly hinted that ExciteAtHome's future was, simply, as a single-focus business: @Home only. It's difficult to believe that new CEO Patti Hart wasn't brought in with the expectation that it would be her job to push through with a full divestiture of the media division.

The situation very much parallels recent happenings with the GE-owned NBC Internet and the Disney-owned Go portal, and to some extent the fate of Go2Net following its merger with Infospace. In Excite's case, a large utility company (AT&T) is the decisive shareholder in a diversified Internet business, half of which is a money-losing operation in a line of business the parent company doesn't understand, the online media business. The @Home half, on the other hand, is a subscription-based, capital-intensive, quasi-utility company with a very good product and rapid subscriber growth. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a shutdown, and not simply an austerity regime, is in the cards for Excite.

Last week Excite@Home announced a 13% staff reduction. However, this understates the severity of the cuts in the media division, since that's where most of the cuts were made. And a glimpse at the figure for Excite Canada - a joint venture of Rogers Media (the cable company) and ExciteAtHome - shows how severe the cutback was on the media side: 29 of 70 employees (or 41%) are being let go.

Yes, Excite was the most tenacious survivor amongst the portal also-rans. But that's a bit being "best loser." Another way to look at it is that they dropped from second, to fourth, and finally to sixth. The portal now lags behind #5, content-rich About.com, and perilously close to #7 and #8, Disney Internet Group and NBC Internet, which won't even show up in the rankings by the end of this year since they're being shut down.

Since Excite@Home is publicly traded, there is no shortage of analysts clamoring for Excite to be "gotten rid of." But when you "get rid of"a portal, where does it go? I've been saying for awhile that there is still an opportunity for @Home to peddle those eyeballs with a long term deal to make Yahoo the default portal for @Home cable subscribers. Beyond something of that nature, Excite being “gotten rid of” is just that. Excite, like Go.com and NBCi, will simply vaporize in 2001, never to be heard from again.

There is a silver lining for consumers: @Home cable internet service is quite good, and an increased focus on that business is going to put pressure on other Internet access providers. Of course, as an @Home subscriber, you'll be giving your money to the cable company and AT&T, which is not so different from giving it to Microsoft or AOL Time Warner. As consumers, we don't own the big pipes, so we take our choices where we can get them.

Iridium, anyone?