IS Silicon Valley really ready for a massive earthquake?
That and other musings of the future dominate computer titles Business 2.0 and Wired.
Wired, Conde Nast’s ticket to the ‘Net, splashes “The Future Gets Fun Again,” but a lot of its package is too dense for non-geeks. Mixing science fiction with tech breakthroughs gives us catchy predictions for the 21st century, such as head transplants and outerspace honeymoons.
Business 2.0’s cover, “The Next 1,000 Years,” offers yet another menu of Internet predictions, quotes a legion of forward-thinkers and offers some helpful articles, such as the case against doing an IPO, and how Silicon Valley might deal with a huge ‘quake. Other good pieces: Why ad banners make no impact, and how lousy e-commerce customer service loses $6 billion in sales.
The future, at least for Fast Company, is success: Owner Mort Zuckerman finally has a hit with this title, whose new 458-page issue is fat with ads. The magazine, devoted to change, lists the “Fast 2000” people who own the future. Among the customary e-wunderkinds are surprises: a chef, an antipoverty worker and a feminist.
Barron’s jumps on the ‘Net bandwagon with an e-commerce package that describes the online strategies of the 30 companies of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and a chat with Morgan Stanley analyst Mary “Queen of the ‘Net” Meeker. Readers, however, may find Barron’s’ profile of Alberto Vilar a tad familiar — he was the subject of last week’s mutual fund column in The Post.
While Time says Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is the most important person of 1999, Newsweek’s counter-cover has “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz, citing his light touch in depicting the human condition.
But after that, the newsweeklies take different paths. Time focuses on its important-people-of-the-year theme, listing as runners-up Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, trustbuster Joel Klein, Bill Gates, Queen Noor (King Hussein’s widow) and golf prodigy Tiger Woods..
Newsweek, meanwhile, speculates on how we’ll live in the next century. Are you ready for publicly traded households and virtual-sex booths? The newsweekly has fun with its “Conventional Wisdom” feature, giving thumps up and thumbs down on historical charters of the millennium.
There are plenty of suggestions afoot about Peter Kann’s stewardship as chairman of Dow Jones, but never has the conclusion been drawn that the Pulitzer Prize winner may be a better financial manager than newspaper man. Yet that’s the unlikely sentiment in the lead piece in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, the respected biweekly financial newsletter. For those not willing to shell out the $695 annual subscription, Grant says Kann grabbed the sickly company by the lapels, dumped weak assets, bit a bullet or two and launched stock buybacks for investor returns “that are nothing short of fantastic … The return numbers shine far brighter than the margins.”
Elsewhere, there’s a tediously long comparison of today’s Internet frenzy to the 1920s’ rage for auto stocks. The funniest bit of the issue is the note that Grant — a longtime bear and Internet killjoy — plans to offer his services in the ‘Net next year in a joint venture with Gannett.
City dwellers escaping to sunny retreats for the holidays have a splendid reading package to carry with them in The New Yorker’s annual fiction issue, which is a double issue. Ironically, the magazine’s strongest pieces this year are non-fiction works, including a great airplane-seat read consisting of letters soldiers wrote home, from wars in this century. Another gem: a memoir of William /Maxwell, now 91, which would have made the legendary New Yorker editor proud. And the magazine reprints James Thurber’s New Year’s musings of 1939 on what we will call the millennium and years beyond: “twenty-hundred and one, or two-thousand and one?”
Of all the millennium lists throwing around names, the most readable is The New York Observer’s. Normally, we don’t do broadsheets, but the Observer pulled off a nice package of the city’s most talked-about, following them around and gathering some hilarious vignettes — so we thought it was worth a mention. As the weekly says of its end-of-the century portraits: “It’s all here: money, food, media, politics, art, law, books, religion, medicine, Internet, showbiz, society.”
Time Out New York celebrates the holidays with a double issue billed as its biggest ever. As expected, Time Out is chock full of quirky stories that turn out to be useful pieces of service journalism. Among them: a thorough listing of holiday hours for restaurants and theaters. Even the always breezy “Hot Seat” interview gets into the spirit with a conversation with the guy who handles the reindeer at the Bronx Zoo. If only Jamie Bufalino’s “Get Naked” column could have done something Yule-themed.