Customer Reviews

The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted

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The author takes a particularly negative stance towards boosters of new technology (such as Nicholas Negroponte)--some of it deserved, but some of not. It's as if he feels it's his role to be negative to counter all of the hype. Since I generally don't have much trouble distinguishing hype about technology from reality in the media, I was kind of annoyed by all the anti-hype, but others may appreciate this.

The other problem with the book is that it sets out to tell the story of John Malone and his relationship with Bell Atlantic. Once it passes the point chronologically when that relationship ends, the narrative of the story seems to wander around without a direction. It occurred to me that the author was trying to tell a story, but in presenting fact, not fiction, he had difficulty with the fact that the story he's telling hasn't ended. The story of the inter-relationships between media companies in the 1990s is incredibly intertwined, and he has tackled it in a style that involves glossing over the vast number of details.

I'm glad I read the book, but I had a strong personal interest in the subject matter.

This book is the single best book summarising the history of cable and its influence on our lives.

I liked the book because I enjoyed reading about the players involved. It would have been a better read had the author not "bounced" around on the time-line so much, & left a few cliche's out.

This book is well written and interesting but seems to lean a bit too much on secondary sources such as the material in Ken Auletta's The Highway Men.

Reading that AT&T had just paid a reported $70 billion to buy TCI, I wanted this book to do two things for me. 1) Explain what TCI offers that is worth so much blessed money! 2) To grasp why the cable industry is so bad and how it will be so great in the future. Davis does a good job laying out what TCI was up to. He confirmed the lunacy of Bell Atlantic's thinking that TCI was the answer. Malone fascinated me with his use of debt to buy up cable outfits by the bucketful, relying on the beautiful allure of the 500 channel future to make him a "liquid" player. As to the second part of the quest, I guess Armstrong and At&t will have to give us the look at the @home future that is fast approaching...I guess! I enjoyed the book overall and it a compelling recapitulation of a crazy series of events. Certainly a good choice forbusiness reading!

It's a history of Malone's cable empire that grew out of TCI, and the early struggle among entertainment, electronics, and telecommunications companies for control of the coaxial pipeline that brought us interactive digital television and the information superhighway's express lane.

A blurb on the back cover from Les Brown, founder of Channels magazine, speaks of the author's "explosive wit." I find Davis's writing, in this book at least, annoyingly snide. His bias against Malone drips from the pages.

Nevertheless, he presents a fairly interesting history of the cable industry, providing a backdrop to the high-stakes, seminal deals being done in the media industry now, involving mega-players such as AT&T, Time Warner, Microsoft, MCI, America Online, Comcast, and MediaOne. This is a time of monumental change in the media industry, and it helps to have a sense of the history.

The titans referred to in the tag line, besides Malone, include Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Gerald Levin, Nicholas Negroponte, Steve Ross, and Nick Nicholas. Oh, and the story prominently features Malone's political nemesis, a former Senator from Tennessee named Gore, who once called Malone the "king of the cable cosa nostra."

Reads like a high school term paper written on the last day of Christmas vacation, an overdose of encyclopedia trivia and lots of cliches stretched to fill the requisite number of pages. How can so many media deals be discussed without any analysis of Herb Allen's role? Is Dr. Malone's only redeeming quality his love for his wife? Many of the people who sit in the "glowing circle of his electric hearth" knocked on his door. Bankruptcy BAD, Malone NOT SO BAD? Was Shaquille O'Neal's skin hue really the only example of digital compression's color problem that Davis could find? Surely some inanimate object that could be more appropriately described as "black" appeared green when telecast via digital.