Marc Andreessen's newspaper death watch - Feb. 22, 2008

Marc Andreessen's newspaper death watch - Feb. 22, 2008: "'When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price,' he snarked. (He's not the only one gunning for the Times. A coalition of hedge funds just bought up 10% of the company and wants to install four of its own candidates on the board.)

Helge: The struggle of the newspapers is an issue for Finland as a leading paper manufacturer.

Andreessen has always been a blunt, plainspoken guy. He grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin, and although he moved to California in 1993 to make his fortune, he maintains a Midwestern intolerance for pretense (and, apparently, fancy lunch spots).

He's a legend in Silicon Valley for having founded and sold, by age 36, two billion-dollar companies: Netscape Communications (unloaded on AOL (TWX, Fortune 500) in 1998 for $4.2 billion) and Opsware (a server-management company that HP (HPQ, Fortune 500) bought last year for $1.6 billion).

Helge: There was a mention about Flock and Ning.

Now he's going for a three-peat: He's co-founder and chairman of Ning, which makes tools to help users start their own social networks. His timing was perfect. Ning was launched just as the MySpace-Facebook phenomenon was taking off, and by last fall it had created more than 100,000 mini social networks..."

Helge: What does he say about managing a print company?

So what would he do if he were running the Times? Easy, he says. Kill the print product immediately and deliver the base line of news online only. "Take acute pain now in order to avoid years of chronic pain," he says. "Basic rule of thumb: Be on offense, not on defense." And the offense? Graft social networking features onto the online Times, of course.