How to post to Radio from, er, Microsoft Word!

AOL Time Warner shares slump
New York Times story.

“AOL Time Warner’s stock has plunged 10 percent over the last two days, as investors have grown concerned about the company’s balance sheet, turmoil in its Internet unit and stock sales by a big shareholder.

The stock closed yesterday at $19.60 in heavy trading, piercing the $20 mark for the first time since late 1998, more than a year before AOL announced plans to acquire Time Warner.”

Inventing the Future

Extraordinarily perceptive article by Tim O’Reilly about how the future of the Net will emerge from a myriad of developments, most of them outside the corporate sector. This piece is in the same league as Clay Shirky’s original essay on the significance of P2P.

Shake-up at AOL Time Warner

Chickens coming home to roost department. Financial Times story here. New York Times story here. And the FT followed up with an admiring profile of the company’s putative saviour.

IN FIVE years’ time, says Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel, all companies will be Internet companies, or they won’t be companies at all. [Source]

Good description of Microsoft — by Ralph Waldo Emerson!

“An institution”, he once said, “is the lengthened shadow of one man.”

“Can the Corporation survive?”
Useful Economist piece on Coase’s theory of the firm and how it stands up in modern times.

Another Homer Simpson joke

Homer is learning computing. Comes to the instruction: “Press any key to start”. “Where’s the Any key?” he asks.

SJ Mercury: Andreessen: Copy protection efforts are doomed. As film studios and recording studios urge Congress to extend copy protection to every home entertainment device, Andreessen said the entertainment industry need look no further than the software industry’s own expensive, failed attempts at encryption to realize it is ineffective at stopping piracy. [Tomalak’s Realm]

From Gerry McGovern’s weekly newsletter…

Customer: “I’d like to buy the Internet. Do you know how much it is?”
Customer: “How much does it cost to have the Internet installed?”
Customer: “Can you copy the Internet for me on this diskette?”
Customer: “I would like an Internet please.”
Customer: “I just got your Internet in the mail today…”
Customer: “I just downloaded the Internet. How do I use it?”
Customer: “I don’t have a computer at home. Is the Internet available in book form?”
Customer: “Will the Internet be open on Memorial Day tomorrow?”
Customer: “Are you sure that the Internet isn’t closed for the night?”

Says Gerry: “These are all supposedly real quotes from real people, taken from a website called Computer Stupidities. If you think the people who said these things are really stupid, then you shouldn’t be designing websites.”

I am reminded of Homer Simpson’s celebrated observation that “they’ve got the Internet on computers now”. Or of the Dublin lady I once overheard boasting that her husband’s new Volvo was fitted with “a cataclysmic convertor”.