In 1994 a paltry 16 percent of America Online subscribers were women and the Internet was awash in Cindy Crawford posters, potty jokes and other testosterone topics compelling to adolescent and not-so-adolescent males.
This week, AOL CEO Steve Case announced that women members now outnumber men, accounting for 51 percent of the customer base at the nation’s largest Internet gateway. AOL’s Merlin of the modems then marked the tilt towards the estrogen side of the chemistry set by launching AOL Women (keyword Women), an Interactive magazine-type area. Opening topic? “Relationships.”
HOME ON THE LAN
NETWORKING YOUR NEST
Rumors rage over an Intel Corp. takeover of 3Com Corp., which last year devoured Skokie’s U.S. Robotics modem factories, as Intel announced plans last week to add wiring for home PC Local Area Networks (LANs) to next year’s Pentium chips.
You could buy several computers and network them together simply by plugging phone wires into each machine. To make it work, the network connects to the Internet through a central modem, and thus the talk that $24.6 billion Intel might snap up $5.4 billion 3Com. Both companies say no comment.
BINARY BELLY LAUGHS
MICROSOFT EXCESS FOR WINDOWS
Simon & Schuster’s “Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop” ($13.95), is a hardcover book decked out as though it were billg@microsoft.com’s laptop computer with each page flipping up as another Windows screen. Sophomoric as it is, this effort by the National Lampoon’s Henry Beard makes good, clean and cruel fun of America’s binary billionaire who, as “Bill’s” own spreadsheet notes, makes $43.78 per second.
The spreadsheet then calculates the “Value of My Time”: Pushing glasses up nose, 1.3 seconds or $56.91 per act; rocking back and forth, 2.1 seconds or $91.94 per rock, ad nauseum.
ROBIN’S EGG
PENNIES FROM REDMOND
Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, Robin to Bill Gates’ Batman at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., brought genuine good news to executives at Chicago-based Easter Seals Society last week. He dropped by the charity’s office on Monroe Street with a donation of Microsoft software worth a respectable $1 million, as was duly noted on the press releases announcing the largess.
Not stated, of course, is that $1 million worth of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server etc. costs Microsoft just a tad more than nada, for which Ballmer (net worth circa $60 billion) and Gates (see above), get a tidy corporate tax writeoff. The upside is big here, however, because a most worthy charity that helps 1 million handicapped people each year gets a huge boost in efficiency.
