Thoughts from the trailing edge

An interview with Mr. Newmark’s boss:

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999–six or seven years.”

Although Mr. Buckmaster is a man who speaks sparingly–even reluctantly–he is given to occasional, and somewhat turbid, outbreaks of jargon-laden speech. Such as this, offered here merely as a sample: “I do think that the Internet is a spectacular tool for any information business–newsgathering and other journalistic enterprises are essentially in the information business. Another aspect to it that gets reported on is drawing the lines within the Internet itself with respect to content generators and various kinds of aggregation and search tools.

“Where does the revenue end up in those kinds of scenarios over time? I think you’ll see the lines will move from side to side in terms of where the revenue lands among the various players in the information economy, which is still very young.”