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Journalist Michael Wolff is a recognized pioneer in the business of cyberspace, meaning he has been developing products and services for the online world since the dark ages of 1994. During the intervening years, however, not all the activities he engaged in, nor all the people he dealt with, left a pleasant taste in his mouth-- although, to be sure, his cumulative adventures certainly have been very lucrative. In
Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, Wolff pulls few punches as he candidly and methodically recounts the single steps forward and multiple steps back that marked his experiences while trying to transform a fledgling print media enterprise into a towering New Media colossus. After developing a series of "NetGuide" books that proved hugely successful, he attempted to transfer the concept to a variety of online offshoots and in so doing connected with
Wired magazine, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, the late Robert Maxwell's media empire, AOL, assorted venture capitalists, sundry competitors and numerous would-be partners.
Burn Rate is a fascinating tale that might best be characterized by the old adage that warns us to "be careful what we wish for, for we just might get it." --
Howard Rothman
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Michael Wolff, the author of
NetGuide, one of the first major guides to the Net, gives you a tour of this medium that could best be described as "Alice's Adventures Through the Monitor."
Burn Rate is the story of Wolff's transition from journalist to entrepreneur in the Internet business--a business in which the investment elite beat down doors to invest vast sums of money in companies whose chief product seemed to be red ink. Wolff reports that what was being bought and sold was not technology, content, or even concepts. It was the potential to be in on something very cool that may one day be sold to somebody else--despite even more red ink.
Wolff's story could easily have been bitter but is instead both fascinating and hilarious. Wolff's money-losing company's negotiations with Magellan--a search-engine company that Wolff eventually discovers is also financially unstable--are comical. The scene where key big shots from a major publisher fall all over Wolff in their eagerness to buy an all-but-worthless name and database are a complete farce. Wolff is by no means above showing his own foibles. Some of the book's best parts are where he shows himself swept up in the intoxicating flow of a deal and calls home to report developments to his wife. She promptly translates the nonsense into sobering reality.
Wolff takes plenty of time off from his personal journey to explore significant events in the development of cyberculture, such as the transition of Louis Rosetto from a least-likely-to-succeed publisher into the creator of the revolutionary Wired magazine. He chronicles the emergence of America Online from dark horse to dominance, while the efforts of companies expected to be major contenders fade into the background.
His candid view shows it all--the oddball characters in expensive shirts and T-shirts, the crazy dealing, the exhilaration, the heartbreak, and the fear. This would be a wonderful work of satirical fiction if it weren't actually true. --Elizabeth Lewis
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