Amazon.co.uk Review
Journalist Michael Wolff is a recognized pioneer in the business of cyberspace, meaning he has been developing products and services for the online world since the dark ages of 1994. During the intervening years, however, not all the activities he engaged in, nor all the people he dealt with, left a pleasant taste in his mouth--although, to be sure, his cumulative adventures certainly have been very lucrative. In
Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, Wolff pulls few punches as he candidly and methodically recounts the single steps forward and multiple steps back that marked his experiences while trying to transform a fledgling print media enterprise into a towering New Media colossus. After developing a series of "NetGuide" books that proved hugely successful, he attempted to transfer the concept to a variety of online offshoots and in so doing collaborated with
Wired magazine, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, the late Robert Maxwell's media empire, AOL, assorted venture capitalists, sundry competitors and numerous would-be partners. Burn Rate is a fascinating tale that might best be characterized by the old adage that warns us to "be careful what we wish for, for we just might get it." --
Howard Rothman
Product Description
Michael Wolff was a journalist and writer; in 1998 he is a journalist and writer again. But in the first half of the 90's he was an internet entrepreneur, Chairman and CEO of Wolff New Media, a minnow in the pond of internet companies, valued $150 million. A story of a strange and surreal world in which companies are valued only in terms of their promise and their hype, because no-oneknows who is going to win the battle for control of the internet, if it can be won at all, and noone has yet worked out any way tomake serious money out of it. Wolff knows far more of internet than we do and is willing to share it, but, unlike almost everyone involved in this brave new world, he is longer trying to sell anyone anything, neither a stake in his business, nor a dream of theelectronic future, nor a dream of vast electronic profits. Burn Rate is hugely informative about world of net,web,search engines, closed systems and online pornography, being incredibly funny, and is as readable as a novel. If there is one book that tells us about what is going on in the complex and confusing struggle for the future of the internet it is this one.
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