The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Q & A: Stan Honey : News Corp. Sets Out to Make Delphi an Interactive Force
Stan Honey
Title: Executive vice president for technology at News Corp.
Age: 38
Education: Bachelor’s degree in engineering and applied science, Yale University; master’s in electrical engineering, Stanford University
Computer(s): HP Omnibook 425, Toshiba 4400 color portable
Recreation: Navigating ocean racers
Favorite Usenet group: rec.boats
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Last September, just when it was becoming hip to have an Internet address, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Delphi Internet Services, the nation’s largest provider of access to the globe-spanning web of computer networks.
The challenge for the executives and engineers tinkering away at Delphi’s Cambridge, Mass.-based headquarters has been to transform the somewhat obscure firm into a user-friendly, entertainment-oriented service capable of competing with better known rivals in the field--such as America Online and Prodigy--without alienating its techie base.
One plan is to develop electronic versions of News Corp.’s media properties, such as TV Guide, and distribute them on-line. Subscriptions have doubled to 100,000 in the last six months, but that’s still a long way from the 1-million mark News Corp. executives hope to reach by next year.
It’s new territory for the media conglomerate, whose extensive holdings include newspapers, the Fox television network, book publisher HarperCollins, and Star TV, an Asian satellite television service. Stanley Honey, who heads News Corp.’s technology group, talked recently about the firm’s plans to capitalize on its on-line acquisition.
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Q: Why does News Corp. want to own an on-line computer service?
A: There’s a couple of different reasons. One of them is that News Corp. has been active in all other forms of advanced media, and this was the one omission. The other reason is that we’re starting to realize that interactivity really means something a little different than we thought. We’re not sure that interactivity means people interacting with a computer because, other than boys playing video games, not many people find that compelling.
News Corp.’s view of new media is that something very interesting is happening, where it’s becoming real clear that people are very interested in interacting with one another and yet, due to the richness of media, as things evolve, people’s interests are getting narrower and narrower. And the on-line area provides a great environment for people to pursue their narrow interests.
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Q: What’s your vision for Delphi’s future?
A: Today Delphi is really a service that’s focusing on the computer enthusiast, and it has the most, the broadest and most powerful access to the Internet of any of the on-line services. But it’s still a text-only service. We’re going to evolve that into an extremely flexible and powerful graphic interface. But the objective is to not lose any of the current subscriber devotion, which is really the computer enthusiasts themselves.
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Q: Does the fact that the Internet is still pretty much unintelligible to non-nerds make it difficult for Delphi to expand its appeal?
A: No. The Internet is just sort of one place on Delphi that holds a lot of interest for people, and today Delphi’s interface to the Internet actually makes the Internet reasonably accessible to the non-propeller head.
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Q: What do people find so compelling about on-line interaction?
A: For me, the thing that’s most interesting is to find people with closely held opinions that either agree or disagree violently with mine in fairly narrow areas. You know, some years ago people all kind of read the paper and you could sort of characterize your interests as you’re a Republican or a Democrat, and you could go to a bar and you could find people to discuss those closely held opinions. Nowadays, the diversity of media is such that people characterize themselves as environmental activists or feminists, and the issues that people feel strongly about are much more numerous and much narrower. And the on-line environment gives people a way of sort of finding a bar that has those 12 people in it from around the country that are most interested in much narrower fields.
Then there’s another part, which is the interaction with other humans, even though it may be anonymous, trying out different points of view or personality traits and just sort of exploring that interaction. And I’m really defining interaction as being where you do something and you get a reaction back that has incorporated genuine human intelligence and is unexpected. As opposed to a video game or something where you’re interacting with it, or an encyclopedia on CD-ROM, where in principle you’re interacting with it but, nevertheless, the answer you get back is mostly what you expected the thing to do. So there’s no real human intellect involved in the interaction.
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Q: OK, but in that case, why would someone go to an on-line service to do something like read TV Guide?
A: They wouldn’t. And nobody really expects you to be sitting on your couch and then you finish a TV show and you wonder what’s on next, so you get up out of the couch, walk into the office, boot up the computer, log in and see what’s on next. What we would expect to happen is that if you see an episode of “Star Trek” and you’re a Trekkie and this is particularly interesting to you and you think that this is an issue where they have violated (“Star Trek” creator Gene) Roddenberry’s ethics on this thing and they’re undermining the whole concept of the show, you are going to be able to go to the TV Guide forum on-line, and there you’re going to find access to the discussion at large on this topic. And so the TV Guide on-line will be the place you go to talk about and find out more about TV. Now, there would also be in the TV Guide on-line forum much more in-depth information about TV shows than the print product would have. You could do things like search for the next Bogart movie or something like that.
Q: How are you using Delphi to exploit News Corp.’s other media assets?
A: I don’t think it’s so much Delphi exploiting other media assets as it is the other media companies using Delphi to allow them to promote a new service to these new customers that own PCs. The TV Guide on-line and the Fox football and HarperCollins assets and reference and education and children’s and so forth on Delphi--this isn’t a matter of Delphi exploiting those content items. It’s really a matter of Delphi helping those companies to bring their products into additional media forms.
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Q: Will Delphi include content that isn’t owned by News Corp.?
A: Yes, we’re aggressively recruiting other content providers.
