According to Variety of the week of May 23, 1998 an article under the heading "Online Entertainment Crashes" describes how the millions invested by Mircosoft to attract millions further millions of PC-gazing websurfers and advertising dollars simply didn’t materialize and that Microsoft will terminate its online entertainment programming production efforts, canceling several dozen Internet series it had funded through development and production.

According to a spokeperson for The Microsoft network, "It’s a fair comment to say that entertainment on the Internet did not pan out as expected."

Although online entertainment doesn’t play a major role in the travel industry, there are several lessons to be learned:

1. The mystics continually predicting the convergence of television, computers, and entertainment media generally may need to polish their crystal balls for the time being.
   
2. We perhaps should reevaluate those predictions about how quickly The Internet will filter through society and question predictions based upon how readily the public will embrace online technology and services of all types (this is an important point).
   
3. People basing business strategies upon paid subscription content (which is where most of this online entertainment effort resided) would be advised to rethink their business plans before going out for that next round of funding.