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While Amazon and Bezos definitely skated close to the edge, most of the rest skated right into the crevasse to be lost forever.
In the two years between the turn of the century and 2002, almost eight hundred Internet companies went belly-up as the so-called “dotcom bubble” burst.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
On January 11, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a story detailing how young upstart AOL swallowed the august media behemoth Time Warner. I like to call these types of articles “merger porn” since, like porn, they offer juicy details and extreme close-ups of two entities coming together.
The connection between this merger and sex was even more explicit when Time Warner’s major shareholder and colorful entrepreneur Ted Turner declared that he had thumbs-upped the deal “with as much or more excitement
and enthusiasm as I did on that night when I first made love some forty-two years ago.” Sounds awkward! Most importantly, the article nailed the situation in a way that I doubt was intended at the time. “Whatever happens, the deal has a powerful out-with-the-old feel and seems to represent with rare clarity one of thos...
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And the planet was ruled by old media executives who perhaps lacked the DNA to make anything substantive happen.
to move on from failure without a care. That’s because inside all kinds of failures are hidden successes to be found.
I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.
“this was, in short, a bad deal in search of a big scapegoat.”
The AOL−Time Warner deal was indeed a kind of Internet Rubicon: It stopped the stupid boom that needed stopping and ushered the nascent industry into maturity with a rough shove.
“Reported analysis” meant I needed to break away from the “to be sure” conundrum that plagued me at the Journal. Editors were always asking me to get someone else to say in a quote what I could say on my own based on the reporting. In addition, they wanted me to always add a “to be sure” statement, in which I explained that even though my querying and number-crunching
crunching showed that some startup gave Ponzi schemes a good name, I needed to hedge by noting “to be sure, not everyone is so negative that this was an obvious flaming trash heap.” Even when I was sure it was a flaming trash heap.
was and would always be a great reporter and a less good employee, which led me to the obvious conclusion that I wanted to have control of my work and my destiny. I longed to decide what to focus on and not spend time chasing or fending off the flood of bad ideas from those who had a stake in the old world.
push the business leaders of
the Journal to let us launch our new venture as an internal skunkworks. That term comes from tech and refers to a tight group of innovators who steal away from a mothership and create a smaller, faster-moving pirate ship.
stands for whatever you want. Delightful. Demanding. Disruptive.” We liked that last one a lot and went with D: All Things Digital, with our conference being called the same. While it seems obvious now, the idea at the time was not. Outfits like the New York Times (which would later create events copying ours) criticized our gathering in an article saying that it was wrong to invite speakers to an event and then charge the audience. To my mind, that is exactly what a
newspaper did: Please let us interview you for our paper… and then charge readers for that.
Everything is always on its way to something else. And so were we, persistent in our goal of shaking up journalism regularly. We had both been bitten by the innovation bug that required that we think different.
Jobs almost never lost the idea that this was a very short life and that eternity was very long.
Other companies didn’t seem to care about either the consumer or the product. It sucks when people settle for an uninspiring product. Facebook comes to mind. These companies tend to see themselves as utilities. We all need electricity, so it doesn’t have to be beautiful or delightful. That’s why the electric company gets away with draping ugly wires all over beautiful cities, ruining the view.
While many have argued that other companies, from Samsung to Microsoft
to Nokia, could have made this critical mobile leap to app-driven smartphones with multi-touch screens and a real web browser, no company had the combination of personality, design sense, and pure pushiness that would make Apple the dominant global hub technology. By 2010, Apple’s market valuation would surpass Microsoft’s, a major milestone.
Podcasting is a word that’s a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. Put together—podcasting.”
“We have the same
values now as we had then. Maybe we are a little more experienced and certainly more beat up. But the core values are the same. We come into work wanting to do the same thing today as we did five or ten years ago, which is build the best products for people,”
I cannot underscore how hard it was to conceive of a massive idea like this at that moment in time, especially since Apple was facing an already entrenched market that was dominated by Samsung, Nokia, and others.
“Let’s stop looking backward,” Jobs declared. “It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Let’s go invent tomorrow.”
Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around. —HERMAN MANKIEWICZ
Dot Wyndoe,
by News Corp CEO and top minion Robert Thomson, whom I nicknamed “the naughty vicar” for his nudge-nudge, wink-wink mannerisms and sly wordplay. Thomson negged on the tech world, referring to them as “bot-infested badlands,” “the fake, the faux and the fallacious,” “mindless myrmidons,” and “solipsistic sophistry,” even as he struck deals with them.
“You have no real ability to ward [disruption] off or to avoid it,” Iger said. “Except by embracing it in some form and using it for the good, or your own good. And so, I just really believe that when it comes to changes that technology is bringing in our businesses, or in storytelling, for instance,
bring it in and use it to your advantage. It’s that simple.”
This is why I always liked Iger. He was not an insecure ostrich who hid from the trouble headed his way. And he was patient. It took until 2019, with the rollout of Disney+, for some tech success to come to the Magic Kingdom. Disney+’s breakout hit was The Mandalorian, a S...
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Unlike Murdoch, Diller enjoyed the tumult, seeing opportunity everywhere. Except for keeping the luxury yacht summers and buttery leather loafers he often wore, Diller was moving away from the entertainment world that had spawned him.
“Hollywood is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth.”
“Hollywood is now irrelevant,” Diller told me in a 2019 interview. “Netflix has won this game. I mean, short of some existential event, it is Netflix’s. No one can get, I
believe, to their level of subscribers, which gives them real dominance.”
Hulu had been created in 2007 as an unholy marriage of News Corp and NBC Universal. Both owned big studios, and along with a $100 million investment from Providence Equity Partners and a spate of Internet distribution deals,
Hulu’s name came from two Mandarin Chinese words for gourd, as in holder of precious things (yes, I know, very twee). Two years later, Disney would join the gang, making Hulu even more
unwi...
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Netflix would not generate original content until
House of Cards in 2013.
Netflix to feast and grow huge. Iger likened it to giving a nuclear weapon to a developing country, which was quickly followed by a pig pile of media competitors trying to go digital together. What could go wrong?
The founders finally agreed to selling to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. (Some fifteen years later, YouTube generated $28.8 billion in revenue for Alphabet in a single year.)
mass. Arguably, the first viral video came in 2006 from Lonelygirl15, a confessional high schooler. Lonelygirl15 presented herself as an authentic troubled teen but, of course, turned out to be an actor with a script and a pair of producers. Fake, yes, but it heralded a new age of content discovery.
“They ‘trust me,’ dumb fucks,”
“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
Facebook having a reputation of pushing the popular term “growth hacking” to dizzying extremes that made AOL, Yahoo, and even Google seem shy.
I advised Zuckerberg to laugh it off and told him to go to the premiere and even hug actor Jesse Eisenberg, who was playing him. “Control the narrative, Mark,” I said. “It’s coming whether you like it or not. And who cares, because you’ll be richer and more famous than any of them in the end.” While he later did laugh it off, including appearing on Saturday Night Live with Eisenberg, Zuckerberg was not of that mindset at this time of the conference. “This is what people will think I’m like, because they believe what’s on the screen,” he said to me, furrowing his unwrinkled brow.
