“News Corporation has identified internet
networking as the next big thing online, after yesterday revealing a US$580
million ($770 million) cash deal to buy the US-listed group Intermix…

“… in April, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch
told US newspaper editors they should be concerned that internet sites were
leaching significant advertising revenue.” The
coaching from Rupert Murdoch was covered here by Henry Thornton.

And today we present Nicholas Gruen on a more
upmarket illustration of the power of the World Wide Web:

Bill Gates keeps
the source-code for Word under as tight a lock and key as other recipes for
printing money – like the ones for Coke and KFC. The price he pays for hiding
the recipe (to stop people copying his code), is that Microsoft takes a long
while – sometimes forever – to fix bugs and enhance software features. The
geeks writing the software have to have a system for discovering the bugs
themselves, working out priorities and then writing the new code. But there’s
another way.

While Microsoft paid programmers to produce
code for users, (and market researchers to work out what improvements users
wanted most) in the Linux world, if users wanted a bug fixed or a feature added,
they did it for themselves.

Read more here.