Cut off the head and the body dies.
Nobody seems to be missing Steve Case.
Consider this possibility: As much as he may have fucked up the merger with Time Warner, and mismanaged everything since, Steve Case was the only guy who could have saved AOL.
That’s what I thought last Summer, when Steve still had his job. Now he’s gone, and AOL is toast.
Time Warner was, and will remain, a media company. With few exceptions (hell, I can’t think of any, except maybe (and very partially ÷ see half the items below) the New York Times ÷ maybe ya’ll can help me here) media companies don’t get the Net.
[Later…] Lance Knobel names two, both in the UK.
How can you tell if they do?
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
- They expose their archives, so search engines can crawl them
- They don’t move around (and 404) their archives
- They don’t refer to their customers as “consumers”
- They do everything they can to make it easy for people to find and use their goods
- They know, instinctively, that doing all the above yields greater value in authority than whatever value in dollars they obtain by selling yesterday’s or last week’s bird-cage liner
- They don’t labor to dumb down technologies, so readers, viewers or listeners are forced to endure unwanted advertising
- They value and work to improve interoperability
- They don’t try to improve on the vacuum-filled end-to-end stupidity of the Net itself
- They embrace and extend the Net’s own infrastructure (which provides that end-to-end stupidity)
- They don’t sit quietly with their thumbs up their asses when powerful entertainment lobbies railroad laws and regulations that limit or eliminate the ability of innovative media enterprises (including themselves) to do business
Doc: Cutting Off the Head
