What would Mark Andreessen do?


Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and now hanging out at Ning.com, in the November issue of Portfolio:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense.
You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by
the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it
famously killed the business–shut it off and focused on its much
smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the
market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense
and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper
companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The
financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion
for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if
you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing
press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you
would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess
what? You’re an internet company.

(via Mark Potts)