
The Last Days of Time Inc - smacktoward
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/19/business/media/time-inc-oral-history.html
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l33tbro
If you're interested in this subject, Robert Hughes wrote a fantastic
reflection about the mythic days of generous staff expense accounts at Time.
Truly unfathomable today.

(1) [https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-
the...](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the-
spectacle-of-skill)

~~~
compiler-guy
At some point in the future, the perks one finds today at Facebook and Google
will someday be similarly unfathomable.

Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or
some technology will come along that they miss, and it will all fade
similarly.

Don't know what that technology is, or when it will happen, but the fat days
for nearly every industry eventually come to an end.

~~~
simonh
> Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or
> some technology will come along that they miss...

Bear in mind that with extravagant perks and 20% time, Google's strategy was
explicitly to maximize the chance that this new idea would be produced by
Google itself.

It's interesting to look back at to what extent this has and has not panned
out. For example, how come Facebook and Dropbox were not developed at Google
and it had to crash-create competing products? Do any of Google's non-search
properties count as next big things? Arguably AdSense perhaps, but that
depended on being Google to start with.

~~~
ghaff
WRT Dropbox, Google has their cloud platform. It got off to a bit of rocky
start but, today, it's clearly one of the handful of big public cloud
platforms which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd argue that being a major public
cloud is ultimately more important than having a relatively niche storage
offering like Dropbox.

Google's big failure has been in social pretty much across the board. It's
tried a bunch of things beginning with Orkut and it's all amounted to pretty
much zilch. I suspect that there's some fundamental mindset mismatch going on.

GSuite/Gmail has been pretty successful (as has maps). Being very competitive
with a company (Microsoft) that had a huge incumbent's advantage has to count
for something.

We'll see if projects like Waymo ever amount to something. IMO commercial
applications are further out than many think and it's unclear the degree to
which it will be Goggle who makes a lot of money from it.

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RickJWagner
I remember liking Time magazine a number of years ago.

Then either they changed or I did, I'm not certain which. Sometime along 2000
or so it seems their point of view took a pointed political turn. (I feel the
same towards ESPN, CNN, etc.)

When that happened, it ceased to become news to me. It was more
'entertainment', and I admit they still had some interesting ideas. But I
didn't really _trust_ Time anymore. At that point, they had reached the point
of no return, it was no longer 'must read' literature. I could easily skip it,
and I often did.

I wonder if many others feel the same way.

~~~
awat
I have to echo this sentiment. I described it to a friend as me losing
confidence in using Time as a reference in a semi-formal graduate paper. It
sort of became an entertainment classification in my mind after that too.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
That was exactly the period when blogging came into its own and current events
were happening at such a pace (9/11! anthrax in the mail! aluminum tubes!)
that news-lite magazines like Time pretty much had to get out of the game.

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davidf18
The article has a Mad Men -like quality to it. Ivy-elites white males running
the business, women related to research roles. Amazon has a series which
reflect the news business, based on Newsweek, from the 1960s.

Good Girls Revolt [https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-
Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS](https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS)

~~~
wahern
From the article,

    
    
      The culture was so “Mad Men,” even at the height of the
      feminist movement, that my boss felt free, when we worked
      late closing the magazine on Fridays nights, taking all the
      young male writers out to dinner at the steakhouse
      downstairs without a thought that they were walking past the
      offices of the only two women in the hall — me and my
      friend, the late Susan Tifft. Susan, a staunch feminist,
      confronted the boss. But we never did get to that
      steakhouse.

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vis52
Time was always a very biased news source so good riddance.

