Via Mashable
It’s rare that I find a short article with so many things wrong with it as I did this evening. As per usual, after I put out an editorial on a topic I tend to get IMs and emails from my friends with article suggestions along the same lines, and Steven sent along a short exposition by Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher penned earlier today.
It starts with a factoid that the entire US newspaper business is valued at $20 billion, and notes that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth about $16 billion each as individuals; Tom’s post cites the source of the fact as Valleywag (even though the fact at Valleywag is attributed to Wall Street Estimates). If this were the end of and totality of the inaccuracies, I’d take no note of it at all, but that’s far from the case.
Here’s the point by point:
“US newspapers didn’t realize GOOG is a media company until it was too late.”
It took me literally thirty seconds to pull up an article from 2003 with the quote: “Surely the buy-up of Blogger is another step towards Google becoming a fully-fledged media company.” We’ve been talking about this very topic for at least half a decade, and none of the news wires or newspapers having their content syndicated have been particularly thrilled about the prospect for quite a while.
