Two years ago, when Mr. MacFarlane, Mr. Henry and a third producer, Rich Appel, began discussing a possible "Family Guy" spinoff, they quickly settled on Cleveland to be its star.
LUCENT'S TROUBLES WERE A MERE hiccup, we wrote earlier this year, suggesting that the AT&T spinoff would quickly work its way back to strong earnings.
It's been over two years since the "This American Life" spinoff "Serial" debuted and quickly proceeded to upheave the podcast industry.
Their success quickly generated spinoffs: deluxe Big Little Golden Books of 124 pages that sold for $1.99; Tiny Golden Libraries (boxed thematic sets of 12 tiny books written by Dorothy Kunhardt of "Pat the Bunny" fame); 78 r.p.m.
None of this is meant to excuse activist shareholders' seemingly short-term financial engineering efforts, like buybacks, dividends, spinoffs and sales, which can quickly send shares spiking while potentially leaving the company more vulnerable later, especially when a company uses borrowed money to buy its own shares.
Matthews runs Wonkblog's viral spinoff site, Know More, which has quickly become one of the Post's top web properties.
But today, Icann said it had realized that VeriSign's hold on the market had weakened more quickly than expected, making a spinoff to create competition unnecessary.
Initial investor enthusiasm for the plan quickly faded because of concerns that the spinoff would do too little to increase profits at the company, formed by the 1998 merger of BTR and Siebe.
"This time the commission is going to make very, very sure that any spinoff of Sprint's Internet business is carried out quickly, fully, completely and will be entirely enforceable".
Twitch started life in 2011 as a spinoff of Justin.tv, a general-interest streaming platform that was quickly eclipsed in size and subsequently closed under the Amazon acquisition in August.
