We were trying to serve everybody out of the same department store. O'Shea says Ask Jeeves was smart to divide the company into two divisions, considering current market conditions. Ask Jeeves has a wide variety of solid customers that'll definitely hold well for the Business Solutions side. It's really going to have to pull some weight for the company. It's a good split.
Battle says the future is bright for both new divisions.
For the Business Solutions side, he says Ask Jeeves' question answering technology continues to save companies money, pointing out that a Web call costs 5 percent of a personal call. For the Web Properties side, he says volume is growing. For instance, volume is up 250 percent since 1999 for Dell's Ask Dudley, which is based on the natural language software behind the Ask Jeeves search engine. Copyright 2000, 1999. All rights reserved.