That didn’t take long. Rupert Murdoch hired Van Natta less than a year ago to try and turn the old barge around. Wired has this handy little outline of Myspace’s trajectory thus far:
We’re not surprised to hear that Van Natta has left, or that the slow pace at MySpace reportedly contributed to his decision. MySpace’s seven-year history follows a smooth narrative arc in retrospect:
1. Copy Friendster but make it music-friendly.
2. Sit back as everyone and their mother signs up for MySpace. Pack it with ads and sell it to News Corp.
3. Sit back as Facebook does to MySpace what MySpace did to Friendster. Lose $100 million due to a missed Google traffic target.
4. Try to remember why everyone loved MySpace so much in the first place: free music.
5. Launch a free music service with the backing of three major labels that’s difficult to use, lives in a totally different section of the site from the band pages where people are used to finding music, and was apparently designed in such a complicated way that it was not easy to fix.
6. Fail.
It’s all good, they will make a turnaround like Napster did.
It is actually kind of refreshing to see a hoary old capitalist bastard like Murdoc holding this “division” accountable to what really matters in business–a profitable revenue stream.
Rupert doesn’t give two shits about “new paradigms”, social media making the world a better place, blah, blah. Don’t make your numbers? Into the wood chipper with you!
@2 is that why he kept at it with Fox news when it was losing ~90 million / year for the first few years? 😉
… to try and turn the old barge around. WRONG!
Should be … to try to turn the old barge around.
To try to do something. Simple, really.
To try and do something … you try, AND you do it also? Makes no sense.
4. Try to remember… see, no problem!
You seem bored.