And Now A Word From England

 

Larry King, American expatriate in London, and a friend and colleague of mine from two stints at InformationWEEK, dropped me a note:

I'm actually on holiday and have been since the day before you wrote this, so I'm just now picking up e-mail at my mother's house, since the first thing she wanted me to do was go with her to buy a new computer -- Compaq, Pentium II, color printer.

She debated with herself over a scanner before deciding that learning Windows 98 was enough to keep her busy. I gave her my computer when I moved to London and created a monster.

So I'm trying to figure out how I feel about CMP. Mostly sorry for the people who work there, I suppose. A friend of mine got bounced out of Ziff after it went public and watched its stock dive. Why can't techie publishers understand either the Internet or the stock market? Ziff put tons of money into its web activity and its television channel, which swallowed it all without so much as burping. I gather CMP was having trouble figuring out how to make money on, or what to do with, other media as well.

So given the complete confusion in the executive suite over what the hell we're doing for a living, of course you want to go public, so you can share your confusion with Wall Street. Nothing a securities analyst likes hearing more than hesitation and confusion in an executive's voice when he's explaining just what it is the company hopes to make money doing. The analyst is going to run right out and recommend that stock to all his brokers and traders. What he's going to recommend is they sell it till their ears bleed.

By the way, when are you people going to learn that if you let nuts have guns, occasionally one of them will go nuts with a gun?

I did point out to him that he hasn't, that I know of, formally become a British citizen yet, so perhaps the use of "you people" here may be a bit hyperbolic.