In its latest move toward transaction-focused services on the Web, Microsoft has announced that it will shut down its adventure site, Mungo Park, and focus more resources on its online travel agency, Expedia.
Mungo Park - named after a Scottish explorer who died on a trip up the River Niger in 1806 - featured a series of expeditions to exotic locations with frequent and sometimes live audio and video updates on the Internet. The site covered adventurist Richard Bangs' raft descent of Ethiopia's Tekeze River and has published reports from astronauts aboard the Mir space station.
Wednesday's move is part of an effort by Microsoft's money-losing Interactive Media Group to pare down some of its more experimental online content and focus instead on nuts-and-bolts transaction-oriented sites like Expedia, CarPoint, and Investor.
Expedia generates more than US$2 million per week in airline ticket sales, hotel-room bookings, and other revenues, and logs visits from about 1 million individual users a month.
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Net hype exposed: A new Forrester report, "The Internet in 1998," concludes that a huge gap has grown between the expectations created by the early successes of the Internet industry and what mainstream firms can really do. The chasm has been widened, the report says, by user inability to keep pace with the integration requirements that come with the multitude of business tools being hawked by suppliers.
The report says 1998 will witness a shift toward simplification and rationalization, driven by four main forces: a more focused approach from Netscape, which has taken heat from clients for its unending array of product releases and their varying quality; Microsoft's focus on integration and refinement of its browser, server, and tool offerings; consolidation of small, independent software vendors; and a strengthened position of Java in the server market. (11.Dec.97)
Reuters contributed to this report.
