Murdoch=clueless

If having plenty of money to throw at stuff indiscriminately made you an expert in an industry, then Rupert Murdoch would be emperor of the SMEs.

But he’s not.

Sure he’s the true king of all media, but his stature comes less from being a prognosticator than from being a guy who can buy an already successful business and add it to his arsenal (and abandon it if it doesn't perform). He really hasn’t proven himself to have good instincts in the online space:

“…when it comes to new media, Murdoch’s record is mixed at best. From the 1990s on, he has repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a foothold on the Internet. There was Delphi, an early player in the online industry, which he abandoned a few years after purchasing it. There was PointCast, a venture featuring something called “push” technology that Murdoch flirted with before it sank as quickly as it surfaced. Today he has staked his claim with MySpace, and he is actively seeking to broaden that beachhead by shopping around for a proven performer he can buy. He has flirted both with keeping The Journal’s content behind a firewall (where it remains at the moment) and with offering it for free, which indicates that he hasn’t cracked the central problem of Internet publication: How do you make it pay?” (I love Atlantic Monthly so much I would marry it. Or it least date it seriously.)

So I had to laugh at this.

Murdoch bought MySpace just as it was peaking, and still hasn’t truly found a way to monetize it, or even keep it terribly relevant. We’ll see what happens with Facebook, but to say that it’s is flavor of the month is like saying that TechCrunch is a little techie blog site.

What. Ever.

Murdoch has a lot of dollars, but he doesn’t have a lot of sense.