The Web and the Wall Street Journal - Malicious Crap

I am so furious that I cannot prevent myself from writing this and
broadcasting it to rest of the sane world.

I just finished reading a story on the frontpage of the Wall Street Journal
written by Joan Rigdon that absolutely trashes the usefulness of the
Web and the content on it. The person who wrote this just does understand the
difference between the Web and a controlled information 
data source e.g., Lexis/Nexis.

The article:

Title: For Some, the Web is just a slow crawl to a Splattered Cat 

The byline is: Many PC users Find Function of the Internet Database Doesn't
                  Equal Hype

I could not see any sense in the title (splattered cat? what the heck is that).

The reason that I am furious is that the business managers already have
a hard time understanding what makes the Web so interesting and important
in rethinking corporate information systems without having the Wall Street 
Journal (which they consider to be God's
word) provide a viewpoint that is completely wrong.

What makes this article worse is the fact that in the inside pages
there is glowing article on the usefulness of the Web for communicating 
with the Armed forces in Bosnia. Also there is a full page insert from 
Dow Jones about the Internet and the Web and benefits of advertising on it.

Good reporting we need, mixed signals we don't need in a world already 
suffering from information overloaded. 

I am going to write to the EDITOR and I suggest that others after reading
it, if they feel the same way write and indicate 
why this piece of journalism (in essense a web critique) stinks.

The result of articles like this is put the fear of technology in people and
scares people away rather than educating them about its pros and cons.

After cooling down, I remain..

-- Ravi

__________________________________________________________________________
Ravi Kalakota			POTS: (716) 275-3102    Fax: (716)273-1140
Xerox Assistant Professor of Information Systems
Simon School--University of Rochester
Rochester, New York 14627          e-mail: kalakota@uhura.cc.rochester.edu 
Author of: Frontiers of Electronic Commerce (Addison-Wesley)
	http://commerce.ssb.rochester.edu/book.html
__________________________________________________________________________

Received on Friday, 26 January 1996 00:07:44 UTC