Wired News – What happened.
1929.com? The summer tide of Net stocks rose so fast it almost seemed that both polar ice caps had melted. Jolting side-by-sides provided much amusement: Amazon.com stock got ink when the company's valuation suddenly exceeded those of its rivals Barnes & Noble and Borders combined – with just a tenth the duo's total revenues. The market cap of Yahoo!, with its nickel-and-dime quarterly earnings, far outpaced those of old media standbys Knight Ridder, Times Mirror, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Round to Bill Microsoft prevailed in its appeal of last December's federal court injunction banning the forced bundling of Internet Explorer on new PCs equipped with Windows. An appellate panel bought Gates & Co.'s argument that Windows/IE is a species of integration allowed under a 1995 court order. Pundit consensus: a serious blow to the state/federal antitrust suits that go to trial this month.
AT&T Mates After a spurned bid to buy America Online for US$20 billion, AT&T plunked down $48 billion for TCI. The thinking? To use the cable giant's network to wriggle into local telecom markets. AT&T investors were initially cool to a strategy dependent on cable technology that won't be in place for several years at the earliest.
Free Kevin With the world's most notorious cybercriminal in jail since February 1995, and with no trial scheduled until 1999, Mitnick supporters fired up a publicity blitz. In addition to the standard pleas for defense-fund donations and slams on big media's spin – the latest is Miramax Films's upcoming Takedown – the campaign faults cyberactivists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for not rallying to the cause.
Yahoo! II Analysts chuckled when Zapata, the Texas fish-processing firm with dreams of Net grandeur, unveiled its latest vision. But investors voted with their dollars, tripling the stock price from $10 to $30 after the company spun off Zap.com, a mega Web site bundling more than a score of newly purchased offerings – including the venerable literary webzine Word. Voilà! – a new portal. Did we need another one?
RoadRunner Roulette Investing $212.5 million apiece, Microsoft and Compaq each bought 10 percent stakes in Time Warner/MediaOne's RoadRunner data-by-cable venture. Has Redmond decided the future is cable? Hardly. Gates is also promoting copper, proving that you can be bold and cautious and successful in the tech world – if you've got the cash.
Portalhood, Part Too NBC bought a 19 percent slice of CNET's Snap for $6 million. Disney coughed up $70 million (and Starwave) for 43 percent of Infoseek. How long until the big media buying spree swallows the likes of Yahoo! and Excite?
OS Churn Despite the soft sell and generally poor reviews, Windows 98 jumped off shelves – 510,000 copies in four days, matching Win95's performance. The effortless $45 million in sales is almost enough to make you think the company has an illegal monopoly going.
Best-Selling Software*
Title Units Sales (US$)
| 1. | Quicken | 5,360,491 | 187,562,323
| 2. | Windows 95 Upgrade | 5,035,226 | 442,987,443
| 3. | TurboTax Final | 4,454,662 | 140,528,891
| 4. | Myst | 3,860,483 | 142,407,699
| 5. | DOS 6.x Upgrade | 3,156,922 | 147,574,039
| 6. | Quicken Deluxe | 2,609,873 | 151,497,938
| 7. | Flight Simulator | 2,392,194 | 107,918,003
| 8. | TurboTax Deluxe Final | 1,896,568 | 84,214,761
| 9. | DOS 6.x Step Up Upgrade | 1,865,327 | 17,714,880
| 10. | Doom 2 | 1,819,128 | 74,828,471
*Includes all versions/platforms sold 1/1/93 – 5/1/98
Ad Boom … The Internet Advertising Bureau said that total 1998 online ad revenues will top $1 billion. It's tiny next to the $170 billion that old media brings in – which, boosters say, only emphasizes the medium's growth potential.
New Alliances Consolidation erupted among network hardware players – Tellabs bought Ciena for $6.9 billion, and French giant Alcatel Alsthom signed a $4.4 billion deal with DSC Communications. Nortel nabbed Bay Networks for $9.1 billion, while Cisco intends to go it alone.
WorldCom/MCI Saga The DOJ and the European Commission blessed the union of the US telecom powers provided that MCI sells its extensive Internet business. Reviving spring talks, MCI closed a $1.75 billion deal with Cable & Wireless.
Love Your CDA The DC Supremes agreed with lower courts: Net service providers can't be held liable for defamatory postings. The close-to-the-surface irony: The ISPs were shielded by a remnant of the Communications Decency Act, whose indecency provisions the high court deleted in June '97.
Carpe Kinsley In a public email, the Slate editor told of almost getting Tina Brown's job at The New Yorker. His story: S. I. Newhouse courted him, grew impatient with his mulling, then called the whole thing off, hiring writer David Remnick instead and offering Kinsley no apology. Career tip: Less carping, more carpe diem.
