Christina Aguilera's sixth studio album, Bionic, sold a little over 300,000 copies in the U.S. in total. which is terrible even for a time when nobody's buying albums (to contrast, P!nk's The Truth About Love sold over 280,000 copies its first week after it was released last month). Bionic had no real hit singles, either.
Christina Aguilera just tweeted the cover upcoming, hilariously named seventh studio album Lotus. She's never given an indication that she has any taste at all (right down to the gratuitous, gaudy vocal running), but it seems like she's at least now owning her tastelessness? She's growing before our eyes. Good for her.
• The renovation of the Old Homestead steakhouse is almost complete. The private party space will be filled with works by Julian Schnabel. [Eater, TONY]
• Via Quadronno may be opening a Tribeca location. [Zagat]
• Tenjune owners Mark Birnbaum and Eugene Remm, along with real estate developer mogul Michael Hirtenstein, are taking over the old Lotus space. [P6]
• at65 cafe, the new restaurant in Alice Tully Hall, opens on Sunday. [Eater]
• Suba's last day in business is February 28th. [GS]
• Some advice on how to buy decent wine on a budget. [WSJ]
Putting media naysayers in their place, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates continued his farewell tour by pointing to old press accounts of companies like Ashton Tate and Lotus as worthy competitors into the perspective only the ultimate winner can enjoy. When asked by CNET's Ina Fried about the early presumptions that IBM would eat Microsoft's lunch and how that turned out, Gates used the opportunity to challenge those who would similarly presume that Google will eventually destroy Team Redmond.
Tomorrow, Netscape is officially dead: AOL is ending support for the venerable browser. But its offspring, Firefox, is thriving. Both Netscape and Firefox had several brushes with death. In 1998, "Microsoft was driving their monster truck after us and they were about to pin us to the wall," former Netscape software engineer Brendan Eich recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that could happen, however, Netscape execs James Barksdale, Eric Hahn, Mike Homer and cofounder Marc Andreessen decided to open the browser's source code to the community. Behold, Mozilla. But the organization wasn't independent of Netscape owner AOL yet. And here's a shocker, AOL executives nearly killed Mozilla through neglect. So who saved the baby?
