Motavalli, John. Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions
in the Battle for the Internet. New York: Viking, 2002. 334 pages.
This is a history of Time-Warner, America Online, Disney, Newscorp,
and the TV networks, as each attempted to stake out its presence on the
Internet before the bubble burst. The author worked for a number of media
trade publications, was the first Internet columnist at the New York Post
from 1996 to 1997, and later worked at CMGI, a dot-com that saw its stock
plunge from $150 to $3. He is very much an "insider," and outsiders may
feel that the book contains too much detail about too many high-flyers at
aging media companies. Nevertheless, it's amusing to read about ambitious
execs as they try to figure out the meaning of the Internet. Is it content,
eyeballs, banner ads, or portals? Without a business plan, is it possible
to make do with high-tech buzzwords? "Bamboozled" is an appropriate word
for the title. Another phrase, found on the flyleaf, is "black dotcomedy."
Most of the detail has to do with Time Warner, which was taken over
by AOL in January 2000. Today, nearly five years later, Time Warner is still
trying to recover, and AOL is still reorganizing. Now all the talk is about
Google, which just completed its IPO and is the proud sponsor of Internet
Bubble 2.0. As a measure of how fast things change, Google didn't get a
single mention in this book -- because in 2002, just two years ago, it
wasn't on anyone's radar.
ISBN 0-670-89980-1
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