The Chicago-based American Medical Association, which started a round of spin control by ousting three top executives in the wake of last summer’s scandal over an alleged sweetheart marketing deal with Sunbeam Corp., moved last week to regain a little prestige with a slick revamp of the AMA’s World Wide Web pages.
The site at www.ama-assn.org may be as close as today’s healers come to making house calls. It brims with splendid health tips, large doses of information about specific illnesses, medical advice and AMA-sanctioned facts. In case the pain won’t go away on its own, a “doctor finder” searches a list of 650,000 doctors throughout the nation. Of these, 40,000 digital docs have added things like their office hours and even their photos to the clickable database.
YOU’VE GOT NO MAIL!
10 MILLION BUSY SIGNALS
America Online celebrated the arrival of its 10 millionth customer last week by going off-line with yet another in a string of near catastrophic e-mail server failures.
AOL executives vowed a fix within two weeks, prompting blue ribbon analysts at Dataquest to rumble that they’d better do just that and to predict that the company has six months “to clean up its act” before more reliable competitors take away its customers.
GOODBYE!
9.3 MILLION HANGUPS
If AOL’s killerbyte CEO Steve Case thinks Dataquest sounded an empty warning, the New York-based media research house FIND/SVP Inc. reports this week a survey showed that of about 41 million people who tried the Internet in the past 12 months, 9.3 million said they logged on, yawned and logged off. They told the poll takers they “no longer consider themselves current Internet users.”
Find/SVP’s Thomas Miller concluded that “the (unwieldy) technology and lack of useful content contribute to considerable user churn.”
CUPERTINO CHURN
ROAD APPLE?
A reviewer can only wonder at Simon & Schuster’s paperback release last week of a book by Gilbert Amelio, the Silicon Valley executive whose feckless efforts to save Apple Computer Inc. from extinction led to his ouster by the board of directors and contributed to losses now well above $1 billion in just over one year.
The book, first published in hardback in 1996, is called “Profit from Experience: Practical Proven Skills for Transforming Your Organization” ($14; 307 pages). Anybody holding Apple stock (it closed on Friday at a limp $18.19. can confirm that Amelio most definitely transformed the Cupertino, Calif.,-based Mac-maker. Amelio’s book did nicely as a hardback when he was at the top of his game, but if ever a paperback needed a new title . . .
