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More hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen.
Judging from certain stories we've been reading in this, the first week of the new year, John Malone's resolution for 1997 appears to have been, "I shall return to my media-manipulating ways of old." After spending most of 1996 playing the Zen role of the silent, mysterious master of all he surveyed, Malone was burned last week by a highly skeptical, unflatteringly negative profile in Fortune magazine, headlined "High Noon for John Malone," with a lead sentence that said, "Often credited with brilliance, John C. Malone, 55, CEO of cable TV giant Tele-Communications Inc., seems lately to be trending toward incoherence." It must have been the word "incoherence" that prompted the normally secretive former "Infobahn Warrior" to invite a Wall Street Journal reporter into his office for an interview that became a front-page story in the 2 January edition of the paper - a story clearly intended to counteract the most damaging comments made by Fortune about Malone's recent remoteness from company affairs. The magazine, for example, portrayed Malone's acquisition of an 80-foot racing yacht, Liberty, as an indulgence in creature comforts predicated on Malone's commitment to his wife to "reduce stress" and "have more fun." The big boat sails again in the Journal article - only this time, Malone claims to be too busy to enjoy it: "I spent a total of six days on that boat since it was built." TCI's deeply disappointed shareholders can only hope the market buys that story.
We don't quite know what to make of Avalanche, the most recent project announced by America Online's Greenhouse. Is it a real, if terribly conceived project, or a metaparody of the entire Greenhouse program? Greenhouse, you'll recall, is one-time catalog salesman and Fred Silverman-wannabe Ted Leonsis's demonstration that AOL is a new-media studio capable of turning out the same kind of dumb, lowest-common-denominator, sure-to-fail projects that Hollywood has always given us. According to the Greenhouse-generated press release, Avalanche is the "First Ski/Snowboard Cybersoap," wherein "Suzy Chafee (aka Suzy Chapstick) and Real-Life Celebs to Appear as Romance and Political Intrigue Grip the Slopes of Telluride, CO." We can only assume the final green light for this project came during a Christmas party after a bit too much holiday cheer had flowed.
Our diatribe in last week's edition against the year-end reviews and the New Year prognostications of conventional pundits seems not to have penetrated the walls of Building #8 in Redmond. That, at least, is the conclusion we're forced to draw after reading the latest installment of Bill Gates' soporific syndicated column. Unable to resist the worst of the columnist's clichés, Gates gave us not just the standard top-10-style list, but a full 15 predictions for 1997. Predictably, added predictions only meant added obviousness. Apparently taking a page from Michael Kinsley's recent essay for Forbes magazine, which waxed poetic about the power of email (Get this: Editors actually use it to exchange story ideas at Slate!), Gates' predictions include "7. Most corporations will employ electronic mail systems by the end of the year, and employees will typically send or receive e-mail several times a day." Since "most" is such an elegantly inexact qualifier (Is it most corporations in America? Most worldwide? Most in the Fortune 500? Most that are Bill's customers?), we can only assume that Bill will be right come 31 December 1997. Unable to contain his enthusiasm, the Pope of Puget Sound also told us that "3. Advertising revenue on the Internet will soar, but not as high as some expect," and "By the end of the year, many people will recognize the historic dimensions of the global interactive network." But Gates doesn't want us to get too excited by his latest vision of the future: "15. My final prediction is that some of the preceding 14 predictions will prove too optimistic. A year is a short time, so some of these predictions may not happen until 1998." In other words, don't hold your breath on that email thing.
