Build Date: Wed Jan 15 00:20:13 2025 UTC
I've been on the road doing comedy for ten years now, so bear with me while I plaster on a fake smile and plow through this shit one more time.
-- Bill Hicks
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 Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
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...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
It’s election night. My wife and I are holed-up in this hotel that my political party has rented out for the evening. Outside, people are being violently beaten for whom they voted for. Is this South Africa? Perhaps we’re in Haiti or some Southern state during the 60’s. Of all the places where this sort of thing happens, it’s mind-boggling that we are in Portland, Maine. (More...)
It's not like I have a heroin problem, see. I'm just a self-indulgent brat who likes to live beyond her means. When I zip down to my corner Money Mart for a little cash-till-payday loan, I'm really not planning to spend it on drugs. I'll spend it on sushi. Seventy bucks of interest for a two-week $400 loan is perfectly reasonable, if you really need that hamachi. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
The Ancient and Correct Sake Ceremony
Many Americans have learned to appreciate the delicate, sophisticated flavors of Japanese food and drink, along with the beautifully refined rituals of Japanese dining. San Francisco, as a gateway between East and West, has especially benefited from the flowering of Eastern consciousness in America. It is hardly possible to walk down the street without stepping on somebody's sushi. (More...)
We here in SMRL's Beverage Research Lab realize that there is more to life than just drinking spocktails. It's important to have other activities. One such activity that we wholeheartedly support is dancing six or more hours to Trance music. So we have designed a drink to accommodate this. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
