Chief Parsons

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons says:

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux Nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”

— The Fighting Sioux, by Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 11 May 2007

Which is amusing enough. Time-Warner thinks the cablecos and telcos are the original natives of the Internet? I beg to differ. Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc. are much more in the spirit of the original creators of the Internet technology and of the people who originally commercialized and privatized the Internet.

But for real amusement, look at the relative stock price graph that Toby Dayton has posted: Google up 300% over the last three years, while Time-Warner has been essentially flat. And the graph was drawn with Yahoo! (Try the same comparison with Yahoo!, Newscorp, Viacom, and Disney over a five year time span.)

Time-Warner is more like the Norse in Greenland. They showed up late, refused to learn the local ropes, and starved to death when the climate changed while their neighbors the Inuit thrived. If the Norse had merely cooperated with their neighbors instead of fighting with them at every opportunity, they would probably still be in Greenland today. Time-Warner is still playing a zero-sum game while Google, Yahoo!, etc. are creating new wealth: a bigger pie for everyone.

-jsq