My own take on the Jon Miller- Calacanis saga
Not sure if anyone of you caught his, but I got to ask Jon Miller a question at Web 2.0. It went something like this:
“Now that you’re open, what are you gonna do with all those Web 1.0 properties you own like XDrive, MapQuest, Moviefone, all that content, downloading services, etc. Why don’t you mash them all up together and create some compelling Web 2.0 solutions?”
His answer was typical wishy washy “oh gee - do I really have to DO anything?” That was Jon Miller.
Its nice to see Jason Calacanis cry about something, and who knows - maybe Nick Denton is right - maybe Jason will just quit. But not after selling AOL his CMS for lord knows how many $1,000,000s of dollars.
I really think that Jim Bankoff is the up and comer at AOL. I also see having a TV guy running AOL as a good thing - as lord knows there are quite a few opportunities of matching AOL to its sister companies - that Mr. Miller wasn’t able to pull off.
Staci gets it right - I see this new management shift as a good thing, but suffice is to say - lets see what happens next.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:28 am
[...] Cause of the three folks I asked questions of - at Web 2.0 - two of them have been fired or quit in the past 24 hours. [...]
November 17th, 2006 at 8:53 am
actually, Marc, Miller’s answer to your question was basically, “Why integrate a bunch of second rate experiences?” His point was that - to him - your question was out of sequence. He didn’t say, “oh gee - do I really have to DO anything?” Instead he said that he wanted his teams to build great products first, then he’d worry about integration.