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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
"Bamboozled at the Revolution" promises to explain just how the lords of New York's media universe got blindsided by the Internet. Its central focus is on the Time Warner empire, whose decade-long flirtation with the high-tech future never bore the fruit that chairman Gerald Levin envisioned in the early days of the corporation's futile experiments with interactive television. While the book offers occasional side-trips to other companies, including Disney, Hachette Filipacchi and the TV networks, for Motavalli, Time Warner is where the action was -- or, rather, wasn't.
For those who participated in the madness of that time, "Bamboozled's" review of the sorry histories of media misfires on the Net -- iGuide, the New Century Network, MSN's 1977 TV-style lunacy, Go, Snap, NBCi and of course Time Warner's Pathfinder debacle -- will offer moments of bitter nostalgia. Overconfident media bosses were unnerved by the Net and became "convinced that there was some kind of special mojo zeitgeist Internet know-how out there, if only they could find it." One might feel sympathy with such confusion -- but laughing feels better, and besides, virtually every one of them walked off with some sort of golden parachute.
"Bamboozled" doesn't find much black comedy in the subject, alas. Motavalli asks us to hang out for an entire book with a bunch of executives who didn't get the Net at first and never really caught on. That's pointless and stultifying.
Motavalli's East-Coast-centric account concentrates on the drabbest aspects of the Net revolution -- the bureaucratic struggles within the Time Warner mothership, the "who reports to whom" battles that must have meant a lot to the participants at the time but that today read like dynastic struggles within a dead kingdom. A better writer might have transformed this material into a drama of corporate arrogance and folly -- but Motavalli is the sort of author whose idea of color is to introduce each figure by briefly mentioning the hue of his or her hair.
In any case, the timing of news about AOL Time Warner has dealt a cruel blow to Motavalli's account. "Bamboozled" concludes with AOL's crown prince Robert Pittman triumphant -- and the Time Warner leadership, who'd sold off their proud inheritance for a mess of new-media pottage, still wondering what hit them. In the intervening weeks, of course, AOL has been humbled, Pittman has resigned, and the Time Warner old guard is back in charge -- with Don Logan, the veteran Time executive most famous in Internet circles for having said of Pathfinder in 1995 that it "gives a whole new meaning to the scientific term 'black hole,'" now AOL's overlord. The only part of Motavalli's conclusion that still applies is that, any way you look at it, the big merger remains a disaster.
So we know who got bamboozled. But who did the bamboozling? There really are no culprits -- aside from one sad account of software hustlers actually defrauding the folks at the Hollywood talent agency CAA. Mostly, the media barons bamboozled themselves; the fear of losing turf to a new generation of technology, and later, the lure of quick Internet riches, motivated them to make costly decisions out of ignorance -- to invest in Web ventures that any observer who actually used the Internet could see were poorly conceived and doomed to fail.
And that, really, was the problem. In the mid-'90s, as the New York media world woke up to the Net's rise, I always assumed that reports of media leaders' online virginity were highly exaggerated. I mean, how hard was it to install an AOL disk? But Motavalli's account leaves it quite clear that, yes, many of these guys who were getting their companies on the Net really hadn't ever used it themselves.
"If you're not an online user, it's very difficult to understand the medium," says Warner exec Jim Moloshok. Well, duh. But somehow this elementary principle eluded media leaders for years. In one embarrassing anecdote culled from an Industry Standard article about the aftermath of the winter 2000 Time Warner/AOL merger, Time Warner CFO Richard Bressler hears about plans to promote Time magazines on AOL and asks, "What are these pop-ups? How big are they? Can you send me some information on them?" AOL's legendary deal-maker, David Colburn, responds, "Rich, why don't you invest $21.95 in an AOL subscription and consider it due diligence?" Ouch.
