Part of me wants to feel sorry for the once-mighty NBC, but the delusional decisions and arrogance of Zucker and his henchmen make me wonder why I should give a darn. For much of the last 80 or so years, NBC was a hugely successful and dominant media conglomerate, having a profound effect on American culture. Losing them seems like losing part of your family. But hey, they are just a business, and have no soul, other than the souls of the creative folks who work there (but apparently not the ones who make major decisions.
The NBC network was not created to enlighten, entertain, or promote human progress; no, it was created mostly to sell radio receivers (and later, TV sets). It was created by RCA, which originally was a holding company that bought up all the patents it could relating to broadcasting technologies, then used their muscle to give them a competitive advantage over other companies. Nothing wrong with that; it's the way business is done. Of course, they had more than a few decisions that weren't in the public's interest. For example, in the early 1950s, there were a number of competing technological schemes to make color television. GE had created what was perhaps the best one; if adopted, television would have had much higher definition and truer colors, but we instead adopted an inferior method that made the US television industry the laughingstock of electronic engineers in the rest of the world. Why? Because the GE scheme wasn't backwards compatible with the monochrome standards of the time (which dated back to the 1920s), and RCA didn't want to alienate their existing customer base. Kind of like the way Microsoft Windows suffered for 15 years as long as they were backwards compatible with older versions of DOS.
But that's another story... Read more »
