February 3, 1998

The Microsoft Media Map

Bill’s well on his way to becoming the Citizen Kane of the Web.

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From Microsoft’s lowly beginnings in Albuquerque in 1975, it has grown into the multinational, new-media-eating monster of the 1990s. Slow to discover the profit potential of the Internet, Microsoft embarked in 1996 on a spending spree unprecedented in the industry, swallowing Internet software and technology companies, and aligning itself with Internet media creators of all kinds, in a high-stakes game of catch-up.

The goal: to control the future of information delivery. Not only does Microsoft have most Netizens’ desktops, it now has a piece of the wires on which their data travels from computer to Internet, with its $1 billion investment in Comcast’s cable modems and its acquisition of WebTV. Today Microsoft is influencing the very ways that data is exchanged on the Net, the ways it’s presented, viewed, created, and distributed.

But why stop there? In the ever-expanding world of new media, why be satisfied with owning the technology that moves information around? Why not own the information itself? After all, there are advertising dollars and subscription fees to swoop on. In November 1996, Microsoft formed an Interactive Media Group which is now flooding the Web with Redmond-copyrighted content through a slew of Web sites under the Microsoft Network umbrella. It’s also developing a new search engine to compete with the likes of Yahoo, and a new home page to battle America Online.

Here the MoJo Wire presents a graphical primer to the Web world of Microsoft: Click on the company names to see their connections.

The Microsoft Media Map does not show the entire Web world of Gates, Allen, and Microsoft; we’re sure we haven’t found it all, and it gets bigger every day. E-mail your tips for additions or changes and we’ll include them in an ongoing update.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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