In short, Sympatico's vision is to become the premiere Canadian electronic community. Now that I've described Sympatico and given you a brief glimpse of the domestic market we operate in, let me share some of the lessons we learned in pioneering the mass market in Canada. I've narrowed them down to a half dozen. This is perhaps the hardest lesson of all. The pace of activity is partly the result of a red-hot stock market in Internet companies.
Stocks daily move up and down by great leaps.
With all the initial public offerings lately, new players rely on short-term flash such as acquisitions to impress potential investors. Sympatico's original projections for market share were influenced by the fact that we have delivered a century of excellence to Canadians in telephone and telecommunications service. But we, too, were caught up in the hype of massive Internet growth and in the wave of formidable new competitors, mostly from the United States. We are also sensitive, but to a lesser extent, to the movements of the stock market and needed short-term profits and revenues. The net result was that our expectations of market acceptance were high for a company with a legacy of traditional marketing methods and a dominant market share.