Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet

by John Motavalli

The internet stumblings of some of the biggest corporations in the country retraces the ill-placed and spectacularly costly footalls of Time, Disney, News Corps, and many others in cyberspace. 30,000 first printing.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2002

Reviews

[Michael Harper · Rating 1 out of 5]

John motavalli of antquebookcentral is disnonest . This book is terrible

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that warms an anti-capitalist’s heart. Motavalli is an excellent writer who knows how to frame a story that involves many players and many organizations. I chuckled throughout reading this book as I read case after case where big important CEOs made stupid decisions concerning the Internet. The chief player in this sorry story is the Time Warner corporation, which threw billions of dollars after bad ideas and then managed to get bought up by AOL 3 months before the Internet bubble burst. Bamboozled gives lots of insight into how the world of big media and publishing work. It details the players at the major companies and traces their incestuous careers as they jump back and forth between companies. The book follows the big deals that either fall flat on their face or are consummated in ways never intended by the people who initiated them. You have to wonder how these companies manage to stay in business.

[Peter Espelien · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a very good book about what big media company's did to screw up the internet. I thought it was very intriguing, because it explains in detail what stupid things big media company's did with the internet and how they lost millions and billions of dollars. The most vivid and shocking example of one of these huge mistakes was the fact that Time Warner thought that interactive TV was actually going to take off. TW also declined to buy into Yahoo! or Netscape.com even after both came to them and asked to be acquired. After reading the book I was left wondering about why the big media company's were so clueless as to think that interactive TV was going to be the thing but not realize the potential in the internet until it was too late. I would definitely recommend it to somebody that likes computers who asked for a book to read.