“I don’t want to do necessarily the same thing again,” I rationalize.
I have been to the West Coast more than thirty times in the past two years, but now, heading out once more after a few months’ respite and no longer a cyber warrior CEO, I’m nervous, uncertain, forgetful. Will the car come? Can I get my upgrade? Should I check my bag or not?
I am heading out to Seattle because . . . well, no explanation necessary. It’s the new capital of the new world.
The assumption, in October 1997, is that the Internet is a Microsoft game.
I have been here—Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, the Campus (they all merge)—several times before. Once, after a long and involved e-mail correspondence with a Microsoft manager about how we—our company and Microsoft—could “work together,” I came out for a face-to-face meeting. The manager said he would call my hotel and leave instructions about where I should meet him on the Campus. There were, however, no instructions when I arrived. No word at all. Nor any calls the next morning. Nor a record of him when I called Microsoft. I have never resolved what happened here. It still seems X-Files-ish to me. But when I’ve described this incident to people at Microsoft, they don’t seem weirded-out or even that surprised. “It’s a pretty dysfunctional place, actually,” is the prevailing explanation for much of the difficulties the outside world has communicating with Microsoft.
It’s creepy, too, I think, the way everyone in Seattle—literally everyone—talks about Mr. Gates, or BillG (his e-mail address), as though this is someone we share, someone whose significance and place in our lives we all accept and understand (and are thankful for). The Seattle obsession with Gates must be at least as extreme as Detroit’s once was with Henry Ford.
The other thing everyone talks about in Seattle is the traffic. As though no one there had ever had to deal with traffic before.
Apparently, the traffic has grown over the past few years as Microsoft has grown and as Seattle and environs have become a mecca of Internet-related start-up companies. Still. Not just creepy but provincial, too.
I’m sniffing around.
I’d like to know if working in the Internet industry means working for Microsoft.
I’ve come out to see one of Microsoft’s princes of content. A crown prince, some say.
A force to be reckoned with if Microsoft becomes a major media conglomerate—if the Internet becomes major media.
Michael Goff, now in his standard issue Microsoft office in Building E on the RedWest Campus, worked for Roger Black, the magazine designer and now the creative director of @Home, back when Black and I shared an office on lower Fifth Avenue in New York in the early 1990s. Black assigned Goff to work for me on a magazine start-up Black and I were collaborating on.
At twenty-five, Goff, who had grown up in Washington as the child of CIA parents and had gone to Stanford, was handsome, tall, glib beyond his years, gay, and remarkably self-confident—unnaturally so. He was smart, too. And domineering. Even at such a young age, a shouter.
While Black and I, with a handful of other experienced magazine hands, had been trying to get a difficult and ambitious project off the ground, Goff was using the combined experience and counsel of this team to put together, in his off-hours, his own business plan.
A year or so later, long after Black and I had abandoned our development efforts, Goff’s magazine, an upscale, lifestyle, fashion-oriented, we-spend-money gay magazine, originally called Rogue but, on my more tempered suggestion, renamed OUT, launched.
Goff, who would turn into one of the more notable self-made media meisters of the decade, was very much self-styled. He had no particular expertise or professional point of view. He wasn’t a journalist per se. Or a publisher. Or even an advocate, gay or otherwise. He was, proudly, an opportunist. A marketer. A name dropper. A big thinker. A publicity hound. A mogul (manqué).
I admired him at the same time I made fun of him (behind his back). He was a gay Sammy Glick. A would-be David Geffen. A young man without a doubt.
I had said to him in mid-’95 or so, “You ought to be doing what I’m doing. Magazines aren’t for you. You should try the Internet. It’s all about big ideas, marketing stuff. You’d be great at it.”
But Goff’s sense of timing was significantly different from mine. I preferred to arrive early whereas Goff preferred an entrance.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “What am I going to get out of this? I’ve looked at it, there’s nothing there. It’s all, like, for techies. What does it do for me? I have AOL. It’s shit.”
“It will get there.”
“Well, call me.”
Long before I ever heard the name (and halcyon days they were) Jon Rubin, Goff had enlisted Rubin to back him in a series of steps to make OUT magazine something more than a magazine and to make Goff something more than a magazine publisher. Goff saw the magazine as a higher order of marketing concept: He saw its direct marketing potential. He saw the power of “the list.” He saw product lines. He saw a gay-related empire.
His big idea was a gay casino.
But his ambition and grandiosity put him on a collision course with his investors, who, in fact, wanted just a magazine.
“I think it’s fine,” he said after he got the boot from OUT, “if they just want a magazine, but that’s obviously not something that was going to hold my interest. Nor do I think that a magazine, just a magazine, is sustainable in this business climate.”
“What will you do?” I asked.
“I’ll be assessing my opportunities.”
His first opportunity, unfortunately, was to get hired by Jon Rubin to advise him on what I was doing wrong.
We were peppered with memos. Why not turn each of our Web pages into a slot machine? Every time the page comes up, the user has the chance to be a winner? Yes, every page a winner! That was an idea both Goff and Rubin were particularly fond of.
By the summer of 1996, Microsoft was coming to terms with its first substantial blunder in cyberspace. Or, actually, in fact its second. Its first was to ignore the Internet altogether, to dismiss its potential as a consumer and business application. Its second, which it faced that summer, was to have built a stand-alone, proprietary online system, MSN, to compete with AOL and CompuServe and even Apple’s eWorld long after it was clear to anyone in the business that online systems would not survive. Now, having abandoned its closed-system strategy, Microsoft was looking out to the Web for a new business and technology model. It had two big ideas: hire real (i.e., old) media talent, and corner the market for local advertising on the Web.
Microsoft’s big coup was hiring Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic and a television personality on CNN’s Crossfire, to start an online opinion magazine called Slate.
Then, after an exhaustive search of New York editors, Microsoft hired Michael Goff to run Sidewalk, its local-city-magazine-type network of Web sites. “I told them that everything they were doing was wrong! They loved that,” Goff reported back about his experience being interviewed at Microsoft.
“Gone Windows: Duo system for sale. Who would have ever thought?” he e-mailed his friends, bidding farewell to his Macintosh roots upon his arrival in Redmond.
It was hard to imagine Goff—almost a caricature of a New York media personality: gay, in black clothes, hyperopinionated, celebrity-fixated—out in rainy, geeky Microsoft land. But soon enough the reports came back that he had ascended to BillG’s right hand. That Goff was the King of Content out in Redmond. That he had ascended to some spectral plain at Microsoft so mighty and rarefied that no one actually reported to him, he just advised Gates and delivered opinions.
“Oh, he’s perfect out there,” laughed Roger Black. “He’s as aggressive and arrogant as they are.”
“I’m really surprised that he’s lasted. The people, the weather,” I noted.
“He’s going to Hollywood. He’s going to be Gates’s man in L.A. when Microsoft makes its move.”
Wired reported as much sh
ortly thereafter.
This was the question: How far and how deep would Microsoft go into the media business? Into entertainment? Into content? By the spring of 1997, there were many media people who were truly freaking out about Microsoft (and others who were frantically and eagerly trying to get Microsoft jobs). “Wait’ll Goff comes,” I took to teasing people. “He’s a shouter, you know.”
Still. When I started to see what Microsoft was doing, took a look at the first launches of Sidewalk (in Seattle and in New York), hung around a bit at MSN, watched MSNBC, went to be interviewed a few times at the highly decorated studios in Englewood, I thought, There’s something wrong here. If I’d picked up anything in my cyberspace sojourn, it was a certain sensitivity to when companies were fucking up.
This is why I came out to see Goff. Because the world is potentially a much more interesting place—at least for me it is—if Microsoft isn’t running it.
In my e-mail I spoke of meaning anyway to get out and see him. I said I was trying to figure out what I would be doing next. And that I was working on this book and thought it might be appropriate to end it with what was going on at Microsoft. “One theme of the book is the transition of traditional media and editorial people into this new media and technology environment. I’d love to come and talk to you about your experience. Would you be game for that?”
He wasn’t. He wouldn’t see me.
He was adamant. Resolute.
It was the Microsoft thing: Don’t talk. Loose lips sink products that haven’t shipped.
Creepy.
The more Goff resisted, though, the more curious I became.
Hey, remember, we’re friends, I wrote.
“I’m deeply involved with where Microsoft is going—and like everything on the Internet, that is changing, and I don’t really want to speak of it at this juncture.” He tried to face me down in an e-mail.
I said I was coming anyway.
“Come on, for old time’s sake,” I cajoled.
“I’ll put you in the book anyway,” I threatened.
“You’re hiding something,” I accused.
He agreed, finally, to have lunch.
Shortly before I arrived to see him, I got word that Goff was making inquiries about buying the company I had left behind. I wondered if this wasn’t a knee-jerk Microsoft response to someone who they thought might have a hostile interest or bad attitude. Suggest that Microsoft might be a buyer. Or was it a more benign reflexive interest? Oh yeah, him, that company. Hey, why don’t we buy it?
But it didn’t matter to me. I was a free agent.
A cab drives me through the rain and traffic (the cab driver tells me he has driven Mr. Gates two different times: one time he slept, the other time he was very nice, a regular guy) to the RedWest Campus and Building E.
As I arrive, a bus pulls up from another end of the campus to dump off a team of programmers for a meeting in a Building E conference room. I think, I could follow them in, slip behind secure doors, peek at white boards, learn secrets.
I’ve seen that movie.
When I first met Goff in the early 1990s, he dressed in gay grunge style (work boots, tight jeans, and flannels); later he took to black gabardine suits (an expensive, ascetic, flattering, high-fashion look); now, in Redmond, he is in relaxed and unprepossessing Gap and other catalogue attire.
I get a warm greeting. His disinclination to see me wasn’t personal. He is just Microsoft and I am not.
But soon enough we are two guys from New York and this is some kitschy place for not our sort of people.
“The water feature,” Goff says, acidly, indicating the highly artificial waterfall on our brief tour of the RedWest Campus.
“It looks like America,” I say, gesturing to the boxy buildings and the template landscaping.
“It looks like a minimum security prison,” he says as we head over to the ski-chalet-looking dining room.
I prod him a little, friendly-like, solicitously, about missing New York.
“This is a vacation, being here,” he says, more than a shade defensively. “It’s time-out. It’s easy.” He laughs. “I’m still thinking about developing my gay casino.”
So he is hedging his bet. I think to myself, It is certainly possible that he is the new man. Micro-Superman. That he is the person at the crosshairs of convergence. His personality is right. He is fluid enough and confident enough. He could do it. He could be whatever is required. Obviously, too, with Gates behind him he has all the leverage and credibility and force that ought to be needed. It’s a pure play opportunity. The only variable is, well, destiny. Is this Microsoft’s destiny?
For the past year Goff has shephered Sidewalk, perhaps the single largest project yet undertaken on the Web—as much as $100 million sunk during 1997. It is now launching around the country (and in Sidney, Australia): Seattle, New York, Houston, San Diego, Washington, D.C. Its fundamental premise has been to take for Microsoft a piece, ideally the lion’s share, of the $60 billion-a-year local advertising market. Retail. Banking. Classified. National brand. Direct. The advertising that now goes to newspapers, radio stations, local TV, cable, and yellow pages. In its grab for this market, Microsoft’s Sidewalk represents the most direct confrontation yet between old media and new media.
That, at least, was the original, sweeping, Sidewalk vision.
But that vision has, so far, been tempered by factors as grand as the Justice Department and as annoying as the fact that most local advertising is targeted at people who don’t use computers.
So the reality is that rather than competing with the local daily newspaper franchise or network affiliate, Sidewalk, whose present focus is entertainment, dining, and soft features, is positioned to compete with the local alternative weekly.
Still, this is supposed to be part of a stealth plan. This is Version 1.0. “Remember,” people at Microsoft say, “Windows wasn’t much in the beginning.” The point is to get into the market. Indeed, in each market, Sidewalk has tried to hire the top old-media restaurant critic, movie reviewer, and name editor.
Were it not for the notion of versions—that you can always do it again and make it different, better—and for the fact that Microsoft will support development until the right approach is discovered, it would be easy to conclude that Sidewalk is a catastrophe. A $100 million wipeout.
Its editorial foot is leaden. Even with experienced, name-brand editors, Sidewalk has that PTA-prose feel. It’s definition-less, identity-less. Dull. It doesn’t juice you, like a good alternative paper. It doesn’t make you feel, “Hey, I’m missing something,” as a good city magazine does. It doesn’t, in other words, send a message, a fragrant “come a little closer” message, and perhaps it isn’t capable of sending one.
And it’s disorganized. Disorganized in an interesting way, because the version in each of the cities is organized differently enough from the others so that you start to think, well maybe it isn’t Sidewalk, maybe the one thing the Web, with its hyperlinks and nonlinearity, doesn’t offer is—well, organization. The Web might be naturally, inevitably, disorganized—anarchic. Without a doubt, picking up the morning paper or using a Zagat’s restaurant guide is easier and quicker than logging on and using Sidewalk.
But more damaging, from Microsoft’s point of view, is the fact that Sidewalk has no traffic. Nobody uses it. Nobody visits it. It’s a ghost town—despite big advertising budgets. It has no traffic because it has no distribution. Microsoft made that wonderful, classic hubristic business mistake: rather than harness the existing behavior of the consumer, it thought it could make people behave the way it wanted them to behave. Remember MSN on your desktop? You’d go to the Net through MSN just because it would be so easy, so “transparent.” Tell it to the Marines—or AOL. While changing behavior isn’t impossible, it is very difficult, quite unlikely, and will take a lot more time and money than you bargained on. A sound lesson.
“I can’t help feeling,” I say, after Goff and I sit down with our trays
, “that Microsoft is running about a year behind the curve, that it’s learning things that I learned a year ago.”
“What? Like that it takes a lot more people and requires a lot more money to do daily edit than anybody ever imagined? That it’s hard to keep things fresh and up-to-date?”
I laugh. “For starters. But I was thinking more generally, too. Microsoft got into the online service business when everybody knew such services were an endgame business. Then it got into creating Web magazines well after a lot of people understood that people weren’t using the Web the way they use other media, especially print media. Then it counted on getting traffic without aligning with a distribution system.”
Goff is blasé. “Nobody’s claiming victory. I don’t know what works. Do you know what works?”
“Sex,” I shrug. “AOL sex chat. Does Microsoft want to go into the sex business?”
“MSN’s sex chat is just as good as AOL’s,” he says, competitively.
“But is Microsoft really interested in building a sex-based business?”
“It’s not something I would be interested in,” he responds haughtily. As the publisher of a gay magazine, he had banned from his pages sex-related classifieds. “Cyber sex doesn’t, personally, get me off.”
“Yes, but—”
“No. Microsoft is not going to emphasize that business.” That sounds not only like common sense but like policy, too. “But you’re right,” he says. “Other than sex, there are no hits.” He means hits in the show business sense. “There are no hits anywhere in the medium. I obviously hope that we’re developing hits. But there aren’t any now.
“Okay, hits,” I say, focusing on the notion. “That’s a mass media concept, hits. Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. We got into the Internet business, at least I did, because the assumption was, ‘This is a new communications technology, so it must be media.’ ”
“Yeah?”
“Well, what if it’s not media?”
“What’s media?”
“Media. Media as we know it. The business that you and I have been in. Media: the means by which we send a coherent message to a more or less large and diverse group of people.”
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