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Cable modem or DSL: Which is better?
My Net connection approaches light speed with cable, but that doesn't guarantee victory over DSL.
By Simson Garfinkel
[09/23/99]

Cool rules
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[09/22/99]

Silicon Follies
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[09/22/99]

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Domain name dunces
Network Solutions fumbles its free e-mail scheme. Can we trust it with our Net addresses?
By Scott Rosenberg
[09/21/99]

Books
A tournament of apes
"The Gorilla Game" goes out on a limb, encouraging us to invest in -- duh! -- big companies that dominate rapidly expanding markets.
By Thomas Scoville
[09/20/99]

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In many ways, McGovern is a throwback to the Victorian businessman. One former employee describes the graying executive as "a Dickensian paternalist." He is renowned for personally handing out year-end bonuses to IDG's 9,000 employees. He stops and, having been briefed by a manager, praises the staffer for an article he's written or an account she's landed. McGovern's formal East Coast bearing leaves some California employees feeling awkward at this moment -- especially as the situation is hardly spontaneous. The employees have been called in advance and told to remain at their desks until McGovern arrives. The stilted ceremony, says magazine consultant Barry Owen about the time he witnessed it, "took on the dimension of ritual."

That personal touch combined with his hands-off attitude toward his business units has created a small-business atmosphere that is attractive to a lot of people. IDG CEO Kelly Conlin notes that IDG's growth and its ability to retain talent has McGovern conducting four times as many anniversary dinners for employees who have been with IDG a full decade as he did even a few years ago.

By all accounts, McGovern's friendly demeanor is sincere. Yet, his regular visits to the divisions of the empire are certainly not confined to back-slapping sessions. McGovern is up-front with his managers, with whom he meets at least quarterly: Miss your plan in three consecutive quarters and you're likely to be fired. He's like a born-again Scrooge who learned how to be human without losing an eye for the numbers after his evening with the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Squeezing a nickel has been McGovern's focus from the outset. He created the International Data Corp., a technology data, analysis and consulting firm that was the first component of what would become IDG, in 1964 by talking a business associate into funding a research project. (At the time, McGovern was an associate editor at Computers and Automation magazine -- one of the earliest technology publications.) When he tried to open a company checking account with the advance payment, the bank refused because IDC had no assets apart from the check. McGovern and his wife at that time hocked their car to create some assets -- and McGovern says that cash is the only outside money he has ever sunk into the business. "We were indoctrinated in running our businesses on cash flow," says IDG Books CEO John Kilcullen.

By contrast, Bill Ziff spent freely while he was at the helm of Ziff-Davis. Owen, who worked at Ziff's PC Magazine from 1986 to 1993, says that he never had a budget. He recalls a former president of Ziff's computer magazine division telling him: "If you think that what your publication needs is gold plating on the cover, then it's your duty to come in and demand it."

McGovern didn't splurge on his publications, and neither did he gild his corporate headquarters. IDG operates as a series of independent fiefdoms with minimum corporate overhead. Because the company doesn't spend a lot on corporate bureaucracy, it has more money to continue funding new divisions.

And entrepreneurs like Bunnell keep coming to him. Kilcullen, for example, approached McGovern after Random House and Addison Wesley had rejected his idea for a new computer book publisher; McGovern says he recognized right away that IDG Books could help him "increase revenue per reader." He gave Kilcullen $1.5 million and the freedom to build the business that eventually sold more than 60 million "...for Dummies" titles. The origins of the Industry Standard are similarly entrepreneurial, and publisher John Batelle even talked IDG into funding separate offices for the magazine, to give it a very different identity from the trade publications created in a big IDG building in downtown San Francisco.

The McGovern style has been to sow his seed capital over numerous business units (IDG currently has about 100 such independent groups) and weed out the unsuccessful ones. But Bill Ziff took the opposite approach. "He believed in himself, his ability to analyze a market and then put together a plan," says Bill Lohse, the publisher of PC Magazine from 1985 to 1990 and head of Ziff Davis' trade-show division from 1992 to 1994. "We did a few things and did them with a lot of effort."

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