Eyewitness by Christopher Davis

Author:Christopher Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harriman House

17 – Thanks, Bill

There were three principal players in the frame to become Dorling Kindersley’s next partner – Larousse, Mondadori and Bonnier. All three were viable candidates in that they were long-established customers of our books and each could have brought substantial benefits to our business. Ebbe Carlson at Bonnier was probably the most determined – he was certainly the most persistent. While Peter was mulling over the options, a curious sequence of events intervened.

Microsoft in 1990 was scouring the world in its search for intellectual properties to acquire – galleries, photo archives, publishing assets. One day, one of Bill Gates’s missionaries, Ed Kelly, came by the office to enquire about the digital rights to The Way Things Work. He met with John Adams who was in the process of setting up DK Vision to exploit our content in video and broadcast programming. The Way Things Work was top of John’s list. In the course of the conversation John realised that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring more of DK than just the rights to a single title, so he directed Ed Kelly towards Peter Kindersley’s office.

There was no doubt that this was a very interesting, if completely unexpected, development. Immediately Peter saw the advantages of tying up with the pioneer of the new technology over being harnessed to the old wagons of the publishing world, however venerable they might be. At the same time we could all see that we would be linking up with a culture very different from our own. Yet again.

Negotiations took place in London and Seattle. There seemed to be goodwill on both sides to make something happen, though it was inevitably laced with a fair dose of paranoia. On his next trip to the UK, Ed Kelly, a slim, quiet, relatively ascetic character, was accompanied by the contrasting figure of Min Yee, another senior Microsoft player made seriously wealthy from their generous stock options scheme (the number plate on his latest fast car read THANKS BILL). Min Yee was a force of nature. Part Chinese, part Native American, he was heavily built but appeared even bulkier when he marched through Covent Garden’s chilly streets in his huge coyote overcoat with his long black hair falling down to his shoulders. You could hear him a mile away as he spouted off about everything under the sun, spraying from topic to topic like a garden hose but never dwelling on one long enough to threaten his boredom threshold, which was about ten seconds max. He was like a creature from an animated cartoon, and his gargantuan appetites matched his personality, as he demonstrated at the DK Christmas party. A month later, when the negotiations were well underway, I invited him to my home to watch the Super Bowl. Not knowing his dietary preferences, Linda had thoughtfully cooked two main dishes, one meat, the other vegetarian. Min was not particular – he had two large helpings of each. When we went upstairs to the sitting room to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.