TIME TO REMEMBER WILLIAM DUNN

This weekend, talking with one of our consultants, Ben Compaine, we were remembering William Dunn.

If you have not had the opportunity to meet him (I did it in Stanford University after he left Dow Jones), let me brief you about this great figure.

He was the Electronic Publishing Vice president of Dow Jones.

A visionary.

Was he was neglected and he did not make it.

A journalist was appointed President of the company, and since he was replaced a few months ago, Dow Jones, and specially The Wall Street Journal, is an amazing case of how they lost the multi-media future.

Forbes magazine was right in 1998 when they wrote about Bill:

"WILLIAM DUNN, 62, must feel a bit like Winston Churchill felt in the late 1930s when, out of power, he watched with frustration as British governments under Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain bungled rearmament and misjudged Adolph Hitler.

Eight years ago, Dunn quit as executive vice president at Dow Jones & Co. when he was passed over for president in favor of ex-journalist Peter Kann.

The original architect of Dow Jones News Retrieval Service, Dunn left Dow Jones with a fat settlement and a five-year noncompete clause.

Since then he has been on the boards of several Internet and CD-ROM companies.

Though he might demur at the analogy, Dunn was as upset by what his successors have wrought as Churchill was at the incompetence of the Tory government, and as openly yearns to return to power.

"There is no passion there, no commitment to electronic distribution of information," he complains about the current management.

"They are just mouthing somebody else's speech. There has to be radical rethinking and rapid execution."

He was right, but never returned, and Dow Jones lost his most creative executive.

They miss you, Bill!

And me too. I still keep the notes of our conversations in Palo Alto when you were explaining a future than now is here in front of all of us.

But you were one of the first to see it.

Damn it!