Steve Case, sober CEO, was on display this morning at Internet World in New York. Delivering the opening keynote address at the industry trade show in New York City, the America Online founder was there to emphasize the needs of the mass market to a crowd of insiders. Unfortunately, a sober CEO doesn't fire up a crowd.
"Clearly, we're making progress on making this much more of a phenomena," said Case early on, a comment he could have made at the opening of any Internet World over the past four years. That remark, and later ones like "Leaders need to lead," set the tone for a speech that touched only briefly and vaguely on issues like privacy, encryption, and the repeated customer-service problems AOL has experienced in recent months.
Case's message was the same as that delivered repeatedly by his far more animated underlings, including AOL Networks president Bob Pittman and AOL Studios chief Ted Leonsis: The Net needs to be made easier for everyone if it's going to attract a mainstream audience. "As the mass market moves toward the Internet, the Internet must move toward the mass market," Case said.
But Case didn't seem to feel it was necessary to sell this crowd on the virtues of AOL as the brand best suited to reach that audience. Instead, the 39-year-old executive adopted the role of industry elder, dispensing lessons of conventional wisdom he had gathered in his more than a decade-long journey through cyberspace.
"If you look at the technologies consumers like the most, it's the technologies which are advanced enough to be invisible," Case said, citing ease of use as one of the three "paramount" responsibilities the industry has, along with safety and affordability. America Online is widely praised for its ease of use, for example, but Case said the company's 10 million subscriber base generated more than 1 million phone calls per week to its help line.
On the safety front, during both his speech and a subsequent Q&A session, Case discussed only in general terms AOL's own efforts to control spam and criminal activity on the service. He did try to reach for some higher justification for industry self-regulation. "We have an opportunity to create something we're proud of, not something we're embarrassed by," Case said.
"The inclination is clearly to regulate the Internet, and that inclination is growing as fast as the Net itself," Case said, referring to the more than 160 Internet-related bills introduced in the current session of Congress. But Case's call for a "passionate" defense of free speech was delivered so dispassionately as to be unnoticeable. In fact, the audience, rather than hanging on his words, left in droves when the address finished and the Q&A began.
As for the future, Case reached for clichés to illustrate his lessons for growing the industry past its current 20 percent penetration of American homes. "We must be reliable. We need to be there when they need us, whenever they need us," Case said - an apparent reference to AOL's many infamous email and service outages. "Although we've made strides in this area, the bar keeps being raised in terms of expectations," he said.
He also predicted that the law of economics assured that a Net industry shakeout would continue. "I think it's fair to say that a shakeout and a consolidation is on the way," he said, comparing the Net industry to the software industry of the early '80s, when hundreds or even thousands of companies merged or died, until only a few large players were left.
"It's a marathon, not a sprint," Case concluded. "The journey is really just beginning."
