Red Herring relaunches online as past and present heads take digs at each other
French entrepreneur Alex Vieux, who acquired the Red Herring brandname, has relaunched the technology and entrepreurship magazine in an online format. (The new owners of the Red Herring brand cannot bring out a print magazine until September 2004 as required by Time Warner--publishers of tech business magazine Business 2.0--which bought the old RH's subscriber list.) Vieux has hired former Business 2.0 editor James Daly to head the new RH editorial team.
In an interview to San Jose Mercury News, Vieux has attacked RH's founder and original editor-in-chief, Tony Perkins, calling the old version of the magazine "hype-ridden". According to the Mercury News profile, Vieux, who served as a US correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, launched business conference company Dasar in 1990. The conference business "put him in touch with the tech elite", the profile says, adding that he now sits on the boards of Computer Associates, Checkpoint Software and Commerce One. Click Here to read the full Mercury News article.
Tony Perkins, who now heads the technology business "blog" Always-on, is upset at Vieux' comments and has chosen to hit back. "As Mr. Vieux embarks upon his new publishing career, he might be well advised to ponder the fate of another Frenchman from an earlier century whose ambition and arrogance were much grander than his own shortish stature," Perkins says in his latest AO column.
In the column's Member Comments section, Michael Perkins (Tony's brother and co-author of the book "The Internet Bubble"), has this to say about his interactions with Vieux: "The most poignant encounter was at Red Herring's 1999 holiday bash. Alex came up to me and began hassling me about the fact that he thought our book was wrong and that we were "misguided." (Gee, Alex, try doing the math). He better hope he has a little more perspicacity in his new endeavor." Click Here to read the Perkins brothers' take on Vieux' comments.