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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
Steve Case: When I read The Third Wave I didn't think of it as futuristic. I mean, I thought of it as being sort of the next big thing. It just struck me as obvious that some day consumers would want to decide what they wanted to see and how they wanted to get it, and not just be passive recipients sitting on a couch with a remote control, watching television or picking up a newspaper. They wanted to somehow interact and do research on things, or talk to other people or what have you. At the time in the late '70s there was -- personal computers didn't really exist. Certainly home PCs didn't really exist, but everybody had a television, so the initial focus for the first years -- in the late '70s and early '80s -- was, "How do you create essentially interactive television, two-way television?" And then later in the '80s, really when PCs started becoming more common in homes, that's when the shift was more profound towards PCs. But the Alvin Toffler vision of this, and sort of how an electronic community might form, as I said, I buy into that. I remember even when I was in college and writing, sending resumes out to different companies, my cover letter really talked about, "We're about to usher in a new digital age, and with two-way televisions and more of an electronic frontier " And this was 1979, I guess, and most people 25 years ago, I think, thought I was a little bit loony, but I just believed. And so, I just kept pursuing that.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
Steve Case: When I got involved in the industry, which was in 1983, I joined a company that had a product for video game machines, because back then, while very few people had PCs -- the Apple II had just come out, and the IBM PC was just coming out, the Macintosh hadn't yet come out, for example -- that a lot of people had Atari video game machines. And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal. Initially to download games, almost like an in-home arcade, but later for downloading e-mail or stock quotes or what have you. I thought it was a great idea, because at the time I knew I wanted to get involved in this sector.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
I remember when we had -- I think it was two or three hundred thousand subscribers. I said, "We're going to get a million subscribers. We're on a march to a million." And people thought I was crazy, because they thought we'd never get to a million subscribers. We were adding, I don't know, it was, you know, 1,000 subscribers a month or something and you'd say, "Well geez, people will be dead before we get to a million subscribers." I said, "Well, we're on a march to a million and we're going to get there and here is how we're going to get there and here are the things we need to do to get there." And after a little while, a few months, people started believing we can get there, and we did get there. And we got there faster than people thought, and then we were basically on a roll, and the growth really started to accelerate. So it really was setting out that mission. It wasn't exactly the equivalent of "Let's put a man on the moon," but for us this march to a million was a big deal, because it meant we were going to go from being a little company, kind of this tiny little upstart, underfunded, nobody ever heard of, competing against giants like IBM and Sears that had Prodigy, and H&R Block that had Compuserve, and GE that had Genie, and this little company was sort of irrelevant. If we got to a million, we felt that kind of put us in the big leagues, so we were on this march to a million, and we got there.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
AOL -- five years ago it was growing rapidly. It was highly valued. It had a lot of things going for it, but the one area of risk and weakness was as it related to broadband technology and higher speed access. Time Warner owned one of the largest cable systems, Time Warner Cable, that provided broadband connectivity to homes and also owned the largest library of branded content, CNN and Warner Brothers and so forth. And so from my standpoint bringing these companies together would enable AOL to not just embrace broadband, but really become the leader in broadband by leveraging the distribution capabilities of the cable system and also the content assets to have a differentiated service offering. On the other side, from the Time Warner perspective, they had some great businesses that had been built over the last century by great entrepreneurs like Henry Luce, who built Time, Inc., and Jack Warner, who built Warner Brothers, and Ted Turner who built Turner and CNN. But it was being left behind, or ran the risk of being left behind, as the world became more digital and more interactive. The ability for AOL to provide sort of an Internet DNA and sort of a different perspective, that could help transition some of those businesses into a future where the growth rates were higher. Music, for example, embracing the concept of digital delivery of music as opposed to simply complaining about piracy, I thought would significantly advantage Time Warner.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
My bet is that the predictions we have regarding the way the market would work -- and how convergence with technology and then industries -- will blur the lines so you won't think of the motion picture industry or the television industry as really totally separate. And similarly, some of the principles of the Internet, which allow people to decide what to get when they want to get it, will become more common in television. I am a big believer in personal television. A company like TIVO has popularized the notion that you pick shows and record them and watch them when you want, which is how you use the Internet. You pick web sites and peruse them when you want. I think that's the way television will evolve, and people will think about television more about shows, just like they think about web sites, and less about networks.
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Johnny Cash
Country Music Legend
It goes back to that music teacher when I was 12 years old. After the third lesson, I was singing some popular country song of the day. I forget the name. I think it was a Hank Williams, no, it was too early for Hank Williams, I guess. Whatever the song was, I didn't sing it like the artist had sung it on the radio. And she said, "You're a song stylist." She said, "Always do it your way." And from the age of 12, I didn't forget that. But that was the way I had to do it, because it was the way it was with me. I had to do it my way. I couldn't read those notes, singing those great songs, like a lot of those singers could, but I could do it my way -- the way it felt good to me. And that's what music is all about, emotion.
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Dale Chihuly
Master Glass Artist
Dale Chihuly: A couple of years ago, I started thinking about hanging chandeliers over the canals of Venice. At the same time, almost, I thought I'd like to go to different countries and do this. And at the same time, I also thought it would make an interesting movie. So the idea just sort of went boom, boom, boom. Chandeliers over the canals, several countries, a film showing the whole thing. I thought about the idea, and I just went ahead and did it. That's one thing that you have to be able to do, I think, if you want to really reach high points, is you've got to take the idea and go, knowing, of course, that it can fail. But never thinking I've never once thought about this thing as failing, even though I'll tell you at the end of the story some of the problems we're having. But we went first to Finland, with 30 people from the Boathouse, my studio, and we worked hand-in-hand with the Finns to make chandeliers, but then when I got there I started doing some other things as well. 'Cause I'm constantly changing my mind about what I want to do. Then we went to Ireland. Then we went to Mexico. And now we're about to go to Venice to hang these chandeliers --15 or 20 of them -- over the canals of Venice.
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Dale Chihuly
Master Glass Artist
I was in a restaurant in Barcelona, a little kind of Italian restaurant, and it had some Venetian chandeliers in the restaurant. I walked in and I was looking right at a chandelier, sort of at eye level -- normally they're overhead -- but then when you sat down on the table you could look underneath it and have your meal, and it sort of acted as a centerpiece for the table. I'd thought about chandeliers before, but I didn't want to make a light fixture really. It didn't interest me to make something that was going to look like a light fixture or a decoration. And when I saw that chandelier at eye level, which this restaurateur had figured out would be a nice way to decorate his restaurant, I put that away, that this might work. And then later on, I decided to do a chandelier, and I put it not only at eye level, I put it almost floor-to-ceiling. And I made very simple parts. The parts for the chandeliers -- which sometimes are as many as 3,000 parts -- are just simple blown parts that a beginner could almost make. Then we just wire on some wire on the end, and you hook them onto a steel armature, so you put the first one on and the second. So the whole piece, the chandeliers, could be made by almost anybody, yet nobody had thought about -- except for this restaurateur -- thought about putting a chandelier at eye level.
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Dale Chihuly
Master Glass Artist
Dale Chihuly: One of the problems in working with glass is that, because glass is so beautiful, and almost no matter what color it is, it's gorgeous, so no matter what you make, people are interested in it. So, in a funny way, you can get away with a lot, because just put the glass out there and people are going to be attracted to it. And the fact that it's so beautiful doesn't work for everything you're trying, for a certain type of thing -- statement you want to make, or concept you have -- glass might not work. Unless you're interested in beauty. Fortunately, that interests me a lot, the idea of making things that make people feel good and give a lot of joy to a lot of people. We talked earlier about the idea of working and not ever having anyone see or appreciate what you're making. And artists have worked, sometimes, their whole life that way, in total seclusion. I can't imagine that would be very fun. But for me, not long after I was able to make things that people were interested in seeing -- I was lucky it happened to me soon -- but the more I was able to make that interested people, the more I wanted to interest people. I was really, maybe to a fault, interested in being able to do exhibitions that would have a wide appeal. I like it when a lot of people enjoy what I'm doing. On the other hand, I am capable of making things that people don't like! But I like it better when they do like it. Or I like it better that -- eventually, what I'm making -- that they will like, and under some context it works. What I'm doing here, at the Academy, we're hanging six chandeliers for the banquet, and these chandeliers, which I started making four years ago, initially were not very appreciated, for whatever reason. In that case I didn't pay much attention to that, and within a couple of years, people started getting interested. And now, when they see them, they like them more. Part of that is just the familiarity of seeing something. You can't always expect people to like it the first time.
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