Month: June 2002

What is the sound of one shoe dropping?
Yesterday’s announcement the Worldcom misreported $3.8 billion ($3,800,000,000!) in expenses as capital items is both astounding and expected.
Let’s face it, the sheer scale is astounding, stupefying. How do you “misreport” that much money?
It’s expected because of what’s going on the market and what led us to this pass.
In the Big Boom, if you weren’t showing a history-defying growth rate, you couldn’t justify your preposterous PE ratio. In the increasingly messed-up telecom market, this would make you an instant takeover candidate.
Consolidation of telecom is inevitable and whoever keeps their stock price up the longest will be one of the three winners. It would be misfeasance to accurately state your financials. That was AT&T’s mistake.
Enron and Worldcom followed the same logic that keeps a compulsive gambler embezzling, hoping for a big win so he can pay off his debts and return the money he stole.
This is the inevitable result of the incremental gutting of our post-1929 restraints on the markets: permitting accountants to sell other services to their clients, allowing investment banks to own retail brokerages, and helping the Baby Bells to use their monopolies to take over their competitors.
The good news is that a couple more Worldcoms might have an impact on the next congressional election and save the country from corporate takeover.
In the meantime, you’d be crazy to have your money in the stock market, whose very premise requires you have as much information as anyone else. Who believes that any more?

NYTimes.com, CBS MarketWatch.com, Weather.com, USAToday.com, and CNET have launched something called the “At Work Brand Network,” to jointly sell advertising across their collective sites.
This sounds to me like a smaller, less useful competitor to DoubleClick. The rationale is to cut out the middleman and get more attention from the sales force. I can see why this would be attractive to the sites participating, but my question is:
Does this solve any problems for the advertiser?
If not, it’s futile

I loved this talk by Howard Rheingold: “The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn’t know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses — they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation.”
This is important to remember at this moment, another inflection point in the history of the Net. The intellectual property hoarders, the computer industry and the government are trying to find common ground in restricting our access to and ability to build on what we have already created.

I just saw an ad for Barbara Walters’ to-be-broadcast interview with Carol Burnett.
In the ad, Barbara asks Carol about the death of her daughter. You can see Carol’s eyes welling up before she answers the question. What a moment.
We, as a nation licking our wounds for the ninth consecutive month, cannot miss this. One National Treasure interviews another–and brings her to tears. Carol is unashamed to weep on national television, and ABC News is unashamed to put it there.
Barbara Walters has brought others to tears–Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul I, J.D. Salinger, Slobodon Milosevic–but each time it happens again it is more transcendent than the last.
Once again, Barbara makes it clear that these beings we call celebrities are all too human.
Until Internet news can do that, it’s not worthy of being called “journalism”.