The.Economist.2007-02-10 (966424), страница 34
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Now that globalfree trade is a reality and the rigid old financial structures are being swept away, things will change forthe better. European business is on the move again.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipFunny businessFeb 8th 2007From The Economist print editionThe tortuous tale of Telecom ItaliaHoward ReadDURING the recent controversy over the future of Telecom Italia a jokewas doing the rounds in Rome.
How do you tell the difference betweenthe Chigi Palace (the prime minister's office) and an investment bank?Answer: in the bank they all speak English.The contorted tale of TI, which culminated in the resignation of itschairman, Marco Tronchetti Provera, in September, holds two lessonsabout doing business in Italy. First, once the government gets involvedin a deal, things get murky and confusing.
Second, powerful businessfigures seem to be able to control companies with only a tiny amountof their own money at risk.In 2001, as chairman of Pirelli, a tyre company, Mr Tronchetti Proveraborrowed a lot of money to take control of TI, in which the Italiangovernment has a golden share. Since then TI's shares have halved inprice and Pirelli's have fallen by half. Last September Mr TronchettiProvera announced that he was going to split off TI's mobile-phonearm.
This was widely seen as a prelude to the sale of the mobilebusiness to reduce the company's huge debts. But such a sale, most probably to a foreign buyer, wouldhave been unacceptable to the left-wing parties in the ruling coalition, especially as two of Italy's threemobile operators were already foreign-owned.Mr Tronchetti Provera claimed that he had told Romano Prodi, Italy's prime minister, about his plans. MrProdi said he had had no advance warning. The prime minister's office published its minutes of twomeetings between Mr Prodi and Mr Tronchetti Provera in which there was no mention of splitting TI(although the minutes contained details of Mr Tronchetti Provera's plans for broadband TV for TI of whichthe market had not previously been aware).For his part, Mr Tronchetti Provera leaked a confidential paper that he had received from Mr Prodi'sclosest economic adviser. The paper floated the idea of selling TI's fixed-line network to a state-ownedbank and also strongly suggested that Mr Prodi's office knew about Mr Tronchetti Provera's plans.
Clearlyone or the other of the two men was not telling the whole truth. Mr Tronchetti Provera resigned, havingpersuaded Guido Rossi, a veteran Italian business lawyer and the chairman of TI at the time of itsprivatisation, to return to the helm. This was seen as a move to stop the government from consideringrenationalisation. If so, it seems to have worked.As for Mr Tronchetti Provera himself, he and his family still control Pirelli through a chain of nested stakesthat give him 25.4% of the voting rights—even though he holds less than 8% of Pirelli's equity. Evenafter his disastrous diversification into TI, friendships and pacts with other shareholders keep him in hisjob.
That's Italy.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipAcknowledgmentsFeb 8th 2007From The Economist print editionThe author is grateful to many people who helped in the preparation of this special report. Particularthanks go to Eric Labaye of McKinsey, John Andrew of Eidos, Dante Razzano of Investindustrial, AlfredSteinherr of DIW, Laurence Capron, Pekka Hietala, Subramanian Rangan and Soumitra Dutta, all ofINSEAD, and Roger Lund.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.About sponsorshipOffer to readersFeb 8th 2007From The Economist print editionBuy a PDF of this complete survey, including all graphics, for saving or one-click printing.ReprintsReprints are available should you wish to order extra copies of the survey. Please send your request tothe relevant region:Worldwide (excluding North America):Rights and Syndication Department26 Red Lion SquareLondonWC1R 4HQUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0)20 7576 8000Fax: +44 (0)20 7576 8492E-mail: rights@economist.comNorth America:Rights and Syndication Department111 West 57th StreetNew YorkNY 10019USATel: +1 212 541 0532Fax: +1 212 641 9808E-mail: usrights@economist.comCorporate offers and customised reprintsFor corporate reprint orders of 500 or more and customisation options, please contact the Rights andSyndication Department in the relevant region:Worldwide (excluding North America):Rights and Syndication Department26 Red Lion SquareLondonWC1R 4HQUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0)20 7576 8000Fax: +44 (0)20 7576 8492E-mail: rights@economist.comNorth America:Rights and Syndication Department111 West 57th StreetNew YorkNY 10019USATel: +1 212 541 0532Fax: +1 212 641 9808E-mail: usrights@economist.comCopyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.About sponsorshipThe future of televisionWhat's on nextFeb 8th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCOFrom The Economist print editionClaudio MunozThe union of television and the internet is spawning a wide variety of offspringBOSSES in the television industry have been keeping a nervous eye on two Scandinavians with areputation for causing trouble. In recent years Niklas Zennström, a Swede, and Janus Friis, a Dane, havefrightened the music industry by inventing KaZaA, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) file-sharing program that waswidely used to download music without paying for it.
Then they horrified the mighty telecoms industry byinventing Skype, another P2P program, which lets internet users make free telephone calls betweencomputers, and very cheap calls to ordinary phones. (The duo sold Skype to eBay, an internet-auctiongiant, for $2.6 billion in 2005.) Their next move was to found yet another start-up—this time, one thatthreatened to devastate the television industry.It may do the opposite, as it turns out.
The new service, called Joost and now in advanced testing, isbased on P2P software that runs on people's computers, just like Skype and KaZaA. And it does indeedpromise to transform the experience of watching television by combining what people like about oldfashioned TV with the exciting possibilities of the internet. But unlike KaZaA and Skype, says Fredrik deWahl, a Swede whom Messrs Zennström and Friis have hired as Joost's boss, Joost does not “disrupt” theindustry that it is entering.
Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, he says,Joost might, as it were, give them new juice.That is because Mr de Wahl and his Joost team, working mostly in the Netherlands, have bravely ignoredthe totems of the internet-video boom. Chief among these fashions is letting users upload anything theywant to a video service—which might include clips of themselves doing odd things (“user-generatedcontent”) or, more questionably, videos pirated from other sources.
The celebrated example of thisapproach is YouTube, which is now part of Google, the leader in internet search. Its big problem,however, is that it can be illegal (if copyright is violated) and fiendishly hard to turn into a business.On February 2nd Viacom, an American media giant, became the latest company to demand that YouTuberemove copyright-infringing clips from its website. YouTube has struck deals with some media firms,including NBC and CBS, to allow their material to appear on its site, and had been trying to thrash out asimilar agreement with Viacom.
Many observers regard Viacom's move as a negotiating tactic. Butwhether YouTube can make money is unclear. Last month Chad Hurley, YouTube's chief executive,sketched out plans for generating advertising revenues and sharing them with content providers, but sofar his firm has none to speak of.Joost is also ignoring the two business models seen as the most respectable alternatives to advertising.One is to make users pay for each television show or film they download, but then to let them keep it.This is the tack chosen by Apple, an electronics firm that sells videos on iTunes, its popular online store;by Amazon, the largest online retailer; and by Wal-Mart, the largest traditional retailer, which launched avideo-download service this week.
The other approach is to let users subscribe to what is, in effect, anall-you-can-eat buffet of videos, and then to “stream” video to their computers without leaving apermanent copy. This is the approach taken by, for instance, Netflix, a Californian firm that mostlydelivers DVDs to its subscribers by post, but now also streams films.The reason that Joost is ignoring all of these methods, says Mr de Wahl, is that none has much to do withthe experience of simply watching TV, which most people enjoy.
Unlike the download or streamingapproaches, he says, “TV is not about buying today what you want to watch tomorrow, it's about turningit on and watching.” And in contrast to the “lean-forward” context of “snacking” on a YouTube clip inone's cubicle while the boss has stepped out, TV is a longer and more relaxed “lean-backward”experience.Hence Joost's most shocking innovation, which is not to change the practices that TV adopted decadesago.
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