Monday, May 12, 2008
Tom Jermoluk takes on everyone from America Online to the local phone company in his bid to connect with the consumer.
Sep 12, 1999 | Nobody in Silicon Valley better illustrates the transformation that the Internet has wrought in the technology industry than Tom Jermoluk. In 1996, Jermoluk left his post as head of computer maker Silicon Graphics to become chief executive of @Home, a new venture then aiming to wire the country's cable systems for high-speed Internet connections. Before that, Jermoluk had worked at Hewlett-Packard and Bell Labs -- a sterling risumi, but it's the risumi of a hardware chief, not a traditional media poobah.
But, in fact, a media and telecommunications honcho is exactly what Jermoluk is. Jermoluk -- known as "T.J." to much of Silicon Valley -- has turned @Home into a unique hybrid of technology and content company, buying Excite and turning the company into Excite@Home. On the content side, Jermoluk has to compete with the portal giants -- Yahoo and America Online.
Meanwhile, Tele-Communications Inc., the giant cable company that was @Home's biggest investor, was bought up by AT&T. Now AT&T is Excite@Home's leading investor, and Jermoluk is part of the most powerful telecom company of all. Jermoluk's relationship with the other players at AT&T has reportedly included more than its share of controversy. Even as he has bid to turn his Excite@Home into a media player, Leo Hindery, the head of AT&T's Internet operations, has advocated sticking to the business of building infrastructure -- "pipes" in industry lingo -- and allying with other Web portals, such as Yahoo and America Online. The debate over strategy has turned into one of the more absorbing dramas of the business world.
When you started out, @Home was seen as a technology company, whose main mission was bringing high-speed Net connections into the home. Now, especially since you merged with Excite, your business is intimately wrapped up with building content. Why do you want to be on the content side of the media business?
Two reasons. One is rather philosophical; one is economic. The philosophical one is that if you build a car and you make it with 12 cylinders instead of 10 cylinders, and so it's 10 percent faster, it's still a car, and people know how to use it. But if you make it 100 times faster, you don't use it like you'd use your car anymore. Our belief is that the content that will come down the wires in a broadband world will be very different. It's not just that you're tired of looking at that little hourglass and you'll get your text-based pages faster, it's that you'll look at content a different way. The best example of this is in the corporate world, where people do have broadband. You see distance learning and IPO road shows and whatever. Because we're inventing this technology we feel that we're the best ones to create the technological environment from the content side as well. [But] we aren't content creators. We're a partner for content creators.
The second answer is economic. Over time, long distance became a commodity. [It's becoming the same with] Internet stuff: Buy a computer and give access away, or buy the access and give the computer away. The subscription part of what we do is $40 [a month] and that will move down over time. It might be $30, it might be $20, it might be $10, one day it might be free. If it is, and you're not participating in the incremental revenue coming from those subscription clients, then your business is to slowly put yourself out of business. Why not make sure that you're participating economically in both sides of the equation? Today, most people get subscription revenue and maybe you get a dollar in media revenue. But how do you know that over time that won't be $20 and $20, or that over more time it won't be $0 and $40?
I don't think there's anyone who will argue that 10 years from now we will be making more money from subscription revenue than we do today. Given this, I want to be on the other side of the equation, I want to make some money on what people are doing by gaining access, not just on the access.
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