Author: Matt

“Nobody knows the new businesses that will come from the Internet. We just want to put people together and give them resources.”

Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, extolling the virtues of a merger that promises more great new innovations like the shutdown of Gnutella, an “unauthorized freelance project” of AOL subsidiary Nullsoft that promised to have negative synergies with Warner Music, ZDNN, 6 November 2000

“I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day? There’s no electricity in that house. None…. They’re not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.”

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on whom it’s slowly dawned that computers are not going to cure world hunger, The New York Times, 3 November 2000

“Hewlett-Packard is working behind the scenes to bring you your favorite Internet experience.”

Hewlett-Packard marketer Maia Ozguc, on H-P’s role in running consumers’ favorite Internet experience — we haven’t yet figured out why the company’s ads mention Amazon, The New York Times, 2 November 2000

“The Napster service will be the Napster service. This is about file sharing, file sharing, file sharing.”

Napster CEO Hank Barry, on the company’s new pay-for-play service, designed to cooperate with music label executives who skipped their kindergarten lessons on what sharing was all about, ZDNN, 31 October 2000

“It’s not really about whether the economics are there or not. It’s about whether you have something good enough that people will want to watch it.”

Heavy.com CEO Simon Assad, displaying a lightweight understanding of his Web animation firm’s plans to make money, The New York Times, 30 October 2000