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| HAS IT COME TO THIS? "We intend to receive the proceeds of this [initial public] offering before making
a preliminary business strategy."
SIZING IT UP Growth in size and number of Web sites:
TWICE AS NICE America Online has more than double the market capitalization of General Motors. THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS Every so often, the HOB (Haters of Bill) crowd renews its campaign to remind the world about purported connections between the archangel of software and yet another historically power-hungry figure. Case in point? This devilish e-mail circulating around our offices: The classically minded among us may remember the TV ad for Microsoft's Internet
Explorer e-mail program, which used the musical theme of the "Confutatis
Maledictis" from Mozart's "Requiem" (Mass for the Dead). "Where do you
want to go today?" reads the cheery line on the screen. Meanwhile, the chorus sings,
"Confutatis maledictis flammis acribus addictus," which means: "The damned
and accursed are convicted to flames of hell." QUICK QUIZ How can you tell that you've gone too far with the whole wired thing? If you fit one or
more of the descriptions below, seek professional help:
THE NEW WATER COOLER With so many people connected via e-mail and the Internet these days, we’ve been getting an amazing rush of biting commentaries about the goings-on on the Web. That may be because of all the recent weird stories about people selling body parts or even babies. But we hope the acidic e-mails don’t let up. As Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said, "If you don’t have anything nice to say...then come sit next to me." One correspondent wrote this about Amazon.com’s decision (quickly scaled back) to let users find out what books were most often purchased at the office by employees at any organization: I hope Playboy.com, Penthouse.com, and Hustler.com get the message and start producing lists of every organization’s "Top 10 Playmates." Or how about having the new drugstore sites list the top drug purchases of their corporate visitors? Wouldn’t you want to know which company’s employees buy the most Prozac or Zantac? Another correspondent had this to say about the news that someone had listed a kidney for sale on an eBay auction: This whole episode represents, to me, the ultimate in noncreative use of technology. Sell a kidney? Right! Like anyone who was really interested wouldn’t know this was completely illegal. What he should have done was license that puppy. Just like software. Don’t sell the kidney, just license the function of it, which is exactly what we do with 99.9% of shrink-wrapped software. Betcha don’t actually read those "click here to agree" dealies during software installations, huh? Just put in a clause that in certain situations (if the licensee makes copies of the kidney and passes them out free to friends, gets kidney stones from not drinking eight glasses of pure water a day, rides a hard-tail Harley, or eats at any place named "Mom’s") the license is revoked and the kidney is reinstalled in the owner. It’s not like you’d be worried about rejecting it. And it’s not immediately obvious that licensing the function of a kidney is unlawful. You’d think that these eBay users would try just a little harder to be creative. Personally, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce that I’m licensing
my sense of bitter irony and that weird thing I can do with my thumbs. Call my agent for
details. SMALL AT HEART "Corporate CEOs are always pining for ways, as General Electric Chairman Jack
Welch put it, 'to get that small-company soul and small-company speed inside our
big-company body.' I submit to them: You can’t really create a small-company feel
unless you create a small company. And you can’t expect employees to think and act
like owners unless you make them true owners." —Bill Gross, chief executive,
Idealabs THE TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT "The self-directed investor has at his disposal what, five years ago, professional
investors didn't have at their disposal." E-BABBLE "The new 'jeaniuses' working for I.P.O. options at the profit-free
start-ups—intensely laid-back execugeeks who never trust anybody under $30
million—have a language all their own....Nobody says now anymore; it’s
all in real time. What is the full stop? It’s a deadline for a meeting
or a phone call to end....Don’t worry about being hardcore; it used to apply
to porn, but now it is a killer-app adjective meaning 'intense, dedicated,
tough-minded.'"
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