This board has been mucho quiet....here's an interesting article from The Fool:
fool.com
File=/news/2000/dis000724.htm
Will Disney "Toy Smart" With Go.com?
With Toysmart's well-publicized privacy problems and Go.com a slow-go at best, Disney finds itself at the center of one of the Internet's great cultural controversies without a proportionate slice of the dot-compensation envisioned when it entered the portal race two summers ago.
By Nico Detourn
July 24, 2000
Ever since Walt Disney's (NYSE: DIS) June 1998 investment in Internet search pioneer Infoseek, website revamps, corporate reorgs, and executive sacrifices have come in waves as the "old media" House of Mickey struggles to build a coherent new media strategy on the Net. So some sense of déjà vu was understandable last week when a new general manager had been named to head day-to-day operations of the Disney unit now called Go.com (NYSE: GO) .
The new GM's job description is making Disney's Go.com properties "the best guide to the Web in the broad lifestyle categories on which Go.com will focus." In addition to famous names like ABC.com, ABCNews.com, and ESPN.com, Disney's "broad focus" includes a 60% stake in Toysmart.com, one of the season's more infamous "Cash Burn Dotcoms" currently in bankruptcy proceedings in Boston.
Information as an asset
Toysmart has also been dueling with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the use of personal consumer information, including Toysmart's gathering information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent.
These are sticky, far-reaching issues, and highlight consumer information as a commercial asset -- for some companies, as Dave Marino-Nachison recently wrote here, "the only real value they managed to create." It was in fact the advertised sale of this information as a Toysmart asset for bankruptcy liquidation that brought to light Toysmart's alleged violation of the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, thus creating the link between the vulnerability of a company's business, and the vulnerability of its customers.
A weekend settlement with the FTC will allow Toysmart to move forward -- though to where is unclear. Disney has said it is "pleased" with the agreement, but it walks a fine line. Missteps -- whether real, or only 60% owned -- are embarrassing. Disney finds itself at the center of one of the Internet's great cultural controversies, but without a proportionate slice of the dot-compensation envisioned when it entered the portal race two summers ago.
Media old, media new
Alliances, investments, acquisitions -- today the convergence of so-called old and new media is nothing to write home about. But Disney's initial Infoseek/Go.com investment was one of the first, and it is still one of the more prominent examples of "Big Boy" media choosing to build its Internet strategy in concert with a young online star.
Go.com's new turnaround manager and Toysmart's problems both made news the same week as CNET's (Nasdaq: CNET) merger with ZDNet (Nasdaq: ZDZ) . Of course, deals happen when they're ready to happen. Still, it's worth noting that just days before Disney's 1998 Infoseek investment, General Electric (NYSE: GE) , the parent of NBC, invested in CNET and the Snap portal that CNET operated. The echoes of that deal can be found today in NBCi (Nasdaq: NBCI) , which along the way picked up the community-based e-commerce site Xoom.com
For all their differences, Disney's Go.com and NBC's NBCi have much in common, most obviously, the Big Boys behind them, and the idea of a great convergence. They also have in common a multi-brand strategy, or at least a multi-element strategy, and a presumption that, somehow, it all belongs together, and that, somehow, by toying with it often enough and long enough, somehow, it'll all fall into place.
But the idea of convergence can't substitute for a coherent vision of what these services should be. And for all the toying the Big Boys can afford, they still have to toy smart.
Your Turn:
Is the convergence of old media and new media as simple as bringing them together and seeing what turns up? What do the old media and new media companies have to offer each other? |
