Build Date: Mon Dec 23 09:40:24 2024 UTC
I really should drink more, but I just don't have the energy...
-- Johnnie Royale
AOL/Time Warner Plans to Fumble Towards World Domination One Misstep at a Time
2001-06-08 09:59:40
Does corporate stupidity know no bounds? Recently, AOL Time-Warner purchased Business 2.0, one of those hype-filled new economy rags, to add to its already overgrown, festering pile of fly-fattening media properties.
O.K. AOL Time Warner buys magazines: it's what its acquisition department is paid to do, I guess. Nothing wrong with world domination, if you're the small-minded weaselly-type actually into that sort of power trip I guess.
Furthermore, AOL seems to be ditching the entire staff of Business 2.0. Apparently the only thing about Business 2.0 worth keeping is its name and subscriber list. This, I can understand too. Sometimes you have to buy an entire wrecked automobile outright just to score a few choice replacement parts for your own ride. So you salvage the carb, the transmission, a tire or two and dump what's left off on some backroad for the government to properly dispose of. Which is in effect what AOL is doing to Business 2.0. And it's displaying a perfectible respectable sense of junkyard logic in doing so.
But here's what gets me: AOL is replacing the Business 2.0 staff with the staff from its own hype-filled new economy rag, eCompany Now, which it is shelving. Now think hard about this for a second: it is buying a magazine that, by its own account, has built up a subscriber list worth purchasing, and replacing the staff of that magazine (who did the work to build up that samesaid readership) with a staff that has failed to produce similarly successful magazine.
So that is the AOL-Time Warner strategy for media monopoly? Buy a successful magazine and replace it with an unsuccesful one???
Yeah, I know that if Business 2.0 were truly successful it wouldn't be sold at spare-part prices to AOL. But it still would have to have had been more successful than eCompany Now, otherwise, the Business 2.0 subscriber list would have been folded into eCompany's, not the other way around. Good thinking!
So what next? Maybe they could buy the rights to Budweiser and have the people who made Zima run operations. Or even better, they could buy the producer of the world's most-used browser and have it run by a bunch of East Coast flunkies who thought the Web would never take off. Oh wait, they did that already.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The quest for knowledge never ends at the super top secret Spock Mountain Laboratory, although it is frequently interrupted by beverage breaks. Recently, a team of crack ethnomixologists returned from a dangerous expedition to the frozen expanse of Canada with the much sought recipe for a Spocktail that is destined to replace blunt force head trauma as the major cause of brain damage in the civilized world. (More...)
Hooray! At long last, a NEW Spocktail of the Week! Kid-tested, mother-approved! (More...)
It was Friday night at the Casa de Baron and everything was in place -- a group of friends had assembled, people were setting things on fire in the backyard, and a Ferry Corsten double-live CD was playing on the stereo. Everything was in place to make further scientific advances in beverage research and leisure technology. (More...)
Pigdog Journal's crack interview team gangs up on avant-garde Dutch musician SOLEX; bad craziness ensues. Yet another fabulous PIGDOG INTERVIEW. For REAL. (More...)
I just came across this coolio essay by Pigdog Journal Science Editor binky wedged between two staves in the back corner of the submissions barrel. It's on the origin of the cyberbilly and is definitely de rigeur for any serious student of this fascinating sociological movement. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
