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Will MSNBC's latest ratings erase Microsoft's unhappiness over its joint venture with NBC? Not likely.
The No. 3 cable news network, under the microscope ever since launching its talk-happy format headlined by Phil Donahue in July, last week released numbers it said demonstrated "significant progress." MSNBC's prime-time audience is up 16%, and Donahue was doing 20% better than what preceded it in the 8 p.m. time slot. The network still trails rivals Fox News Channel and CNN.
But MSNBC's periodic uncertainty over whether Bill Gates wants to pull out of the venture isn't about programming or even ratings. An MSNBC spokesperson denies Microsoft is unhappy at all saying "they have been great supporters of the new format."
But senior executives at MSNBC acknowledge that Gates has been upset for some time. The fact is that when NBC parent General Electric and Microsoft got together to create MSNBC, NBC CEO Bob Wright and then-NBC Cable president Tom Rogers got the best of the deal. (Rogers is now chairman and CEO of Primedia, owner of Cable World.) And it's something that comes up whenever executives of the two companies get together. Publicly, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that if he had to do it over, Microsoft wouldn't have done MSNBC.
But no matter how often or how publicly Microsoft complains about the terms of the deal, former...