An imaginary place in a reactionary time

AOLTW just posted the largest loss in U.S. history, a loss bigger than the GDP of Egypt:

http://news.lycos.com/news/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=636795

Hmm. . .And here I thought it was the dinosaurs who had the "failed business models." Silly me. . .

why do you think they call old media companies dinosaurs? Steve Albini's essay from about ten years ago.

as you yourself know first hand, these people do things with accounting that make enron look like mother teresa. as long as they controlled the production and distribution, things were fine for them. that's all over.

they kept DAT out of america--and kept even japanese machines from having digital i/o, not because of copying, but because it made you a record studio. now you can record direct to your hard drive, in any format you want, any resolution. now the net gives you distribution. CDburners give you production. a computer means you can do it all, from the t-shirt design to the itinary. ask danny.

hmmm...either your link is wrong or the worm has eaten lycos' server. or the page is gone...too bad, nothing could make me happier than reading reading about catastrophic failure w/in big media.

But, Ffej, the TW division was quite profitable. It was the AOL division which lost all the money, and wiped out the profit from entertainment.

What ever happened to Albani

the link works here. should work for you. the tw division was sinking before the buyout. while all the noise has been about the aol side, the movie/record side has been engaging in enronesque accounting for years. what you don't understand, and what makes all the techies laugh, is aol always considered itself a content company, and was run like one. they weren't even on the internet till way late in the game, they were a propriatary network--they still use a propriatary protocol to get online. their bizniz model has always been content (aol keyword lockedin.) they figured out early (according to them) that standards based networking was availible to every mom and pop ISP, so if they carried over their model to the idea of internet, they'd be more successfull.

they charge the same as everyone else, they have to build a seperate network, they engage in dinosaur like promotion, they engage in dinosaur like acquisition, they have an A&R system (norman lear has worked for AOL for almost 15 years in that capacity,) they piss away a dinosaur like fortune on branding, QED, they're a dinosaur too.

i dunno if albini still lives off of belmont, but he's still in town, and still has a band (shellac) which plays out. i don't hang out with that crowd anymore--haven't since my old drummer quit urge overkill.

The company actually had an operating profit in the entertainment division. Most of the loss was an extraordinary write-off of goodwill associated with the AOL acquisition (the rest was actual operating losses at AOL.)

In plain English, that means TW has formally admitted that it paid way too much for AOL. It's no surprise that Case was shown the door before they did that.

As is the fashion with mergers in recent years, the company which got swallowed was spared the indignity of admitting it by getting top billing on the corporate name. But, make no mistake about it, TW bought a subscriber base, the purchase price was expressed as a multiple of subscribers (as in telecoms and cable,) and TW, a real content company, sneered at the notion that AOL had any content worth paying for.

Maybe you believed Case's hype, but TW didn't. TW's mistake was not one of misunderstanding what it was buying. TW's mistake was buying just before the bubble burst. The hype they believed was the general hype surrounding "The New World Information Order."

They had lots of company in that mistake.

I heard Turner resigned as well. I thought turner was ok. He was a southerner who called the fundementalists losers (a very accurate but dangerous statement for a southerner), he married Jane Fonda and my nieghbor sailed with him and found him to be exacting but decent enough.

Thank for the update ffej. Did we know each other back in the punker days?

only trouble that analysis is thatal bought time warner. look it up.

as long as we're playing fast and loose, lets call the stockmarket a parimutual dinosaur too.

no, oakey, we didn't. i just know albini from bands and shit, not personally.

true story: it's my birthday, august of 88, 4 months after back surgery. i'm in line at the metro for the Pere Ubu reunion (with Chris Cutler!) One of the few times i ever ran into Lana Levin outside of work or back in the day at the express, and we chatted. meanwhile the yups in front of us were trying desperetly to be hipper then thou, and were name dropping. lana overheard them mention albini (or was it just rapeman? got a story about the name as well) and taps the name dropper on the shoulder and says "i've slept in Steve Albini's bed." all hell breaks loose, and eventually they take off when they learn this was the line for ticket holders, and the show was sold out. i ask lana when she slept with Albini, she replys that she never slept with him, just took care of his house while he was on tour in europe. then she takes off for work at lounge axxe.

she also shot some photos for hogbutcher and a few other projects albini was involved in. her good friend was going out with battaille who was in urge...

i was fringe on the fringe. i did know al, and most of his girlfriends (and one kid) for a couple of whiles. while one, louises sister worked in record store with him over 20 years ago, and most of the evenstoners i knew bought heir drugs there. do the math. chris bruce (another one of lana's ex's), who hangs with chris connolly worked there too, before he went off to work with Seal. that was later. blah blah blah. i used to know shay jones, and even worked on her computer....blah blah starfucker blah blah lah lah. lemme tell you about the time i didn't get to go to the world premier of silence of the lambs with ted levine, because someone was sulking. blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah

whoops. sorry. i get nostalgic for my old leather. but it's gone with the girl and the times. only in a movie do the old bunch ride again, our ride is over. besides the whole "he stole the girl and my leather" is so hokie, and boring.

Gateway gets SEC notice Gateway Inc. on Wednesday reported its eighth quarterly loss in nine quarters as the No. 3 U.S. personal-computer maker "reeled from stiff competition, a weak economy and slack technology demand." Gateway, based in Poway, California, reported a fourth-quarter loss of $72 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with year-ago net income of $9.4 million, or 3 cents a share. Revenue fell to $1.06 billion from $1.14 billion. The company also received a Wells notice which gives the target some time to mount a defense against a potential action from the SEC.

l;ooks like the build it better thread was hosed when the cellphone crashed. damn. have to redo it. on main page.

Gateway, meanwhile, reported a quarterly loss of $72 million on sales of $1.06 billion, thanks in part to a disputed reduction in payments from AOL.

  In comparison, the most recent Apple financials showed a $8 million quarterly loss on $1.47 billion in revenues. Apple reported selling 743,000 computers, while Gateway sold 720,000 systems. The companies both have their own retail stores, as well as their online stores.