Bamboozled at the Revolution

Résumé du livre

It was one of the most remarkable epochs in American business history -- a time when technology and finance joined forces to create so novel a paradigm, such phenomenal growth, and so unfettered an enthusiasm for making money that the scenario couldn't possibly last. Of course, it didn't, but even the most doomsaying bears couldn't have predicted that the Age of the Internet would be both so short-lived and so catastrophic for the dreamers of its impossible dreams. Nowhere did the black dotcomedy prove to have greater repercussions than in the world of big media, the domain of long-established giants like Time, Disney, Newscorp, and the TV networks. These venerable companies, which had been carefully developing their business models -- and loyal audiences -- for years, suddenly found themselves facing in the Web a new world for which they were ill-prepared and underfunded. Baffled by this sudden eruption of URLs and hits-per-day, but well aware they could not stand by on the sidelines while fortunes were being made by know-nothing novices in the flash of an IPO, Old Media set out to claim what it believed was its own rightful territory on this lawless frontier. By the time the dust had settled less than a decade later, it had lost hundreds of millions of dollars, laid off thousands of people, and suffered the infinite scorn of media critics, while the largest and most revered of the bunch, Time Warner, finally sold out to a scrappy company almost no one had heard of at the dawn of the '90s called AOL.