That is the vocabulary of an advertising salesman, which Karmazin is, and it is worlds away from the high-flown phrases of Internet evangelists. Levin, the former chief executive of AOL Time Warner and architect of last year's merger that created it, once likened the Net to the ancient library at Alexandria -- enormous, democratic and free.
Karmazin said, he has read more than 100 business plans for Internet start-ups seeking to be acquired by Viacom. Some were more than start-ups: Sumner M. Redstone, Viacom's chairman, turned away Pittman when he proposed that Viacom buy America Online.
In almost all cases, neither Karmazin nor Redstone was able to justify the high price of the start-ups, based on their projected long-term contribution to Viacom's sales and profits.
"These things are de minimus to a company of our size," Karmazin said. "Why in the world would I pay an exorbitant price when the thing is only going to be a small part of my company in five years?"
In Middelhoff's four years atop Bertelsmann, his forays into the Internet were all about transformation. He fervently believed that the Web was reinventing the way people buy books and CDs, two of Bertelsmann's core products. After trying to buy Amazon.com, Middelhoff poured hundreds of millions of dollars into online stores like BOL.com and CDNow.com.
The losses piled up, and the ventures were eventually folded into Bertelsmann's traditional book and music clubs.
Middelhoff's most prominent Internet crusade -- if not the most costly -- was Napster, the online file-sharing service that vowed to revolutionize the distribution of music. Napster was vilified by the music companies as a pirate in pioneer's clothes.
Middelhoff did not respond to requests for an interview.
Redstone of Viacom said the mistake that some companies made was to overestimate how quickly new technologies would alter people's habits."Behavioral patterns don't change that easily. Americans are passive. They will continue to write checks and shop at stores," he said.
Analysts attribute much of Viacom's current favor on Wall Street to the fact that it avoided the costly Internet missteps of other media companies. As important, it has so far avoided the management upheaval that often accompanies mergers of old, and new, media companies.
But convergence -- whether defined as the melding of content and distribution or the fusing of traditional media properties with the Internet -- is well under way.
And unless companies learn to harness digital technology and the Internet, experts say, they risk having the underlying economics of their businesses sabotaged by it.
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