Science & Tech Quote by Jean-Marie Messier

Messier’s line is corporate prophecy delivered with the confidence of a man trying to will a new reality into being. The promise isn’t just scale; it’s inevitability: “one of the very few” signals a coming shakeout where most players die and a tiny priesthood of winners governs the networked world. That phrasing flatters investors and employees alike, inviting them to see themselves as early citizens of a future empire rather than participants in a risky restructuring.

The subtext is a late-1990s/early-2000s faith that “communications” would become the master industry, swallowing media, telecom, and utilities into a single, borderless platform business. “Internet age” does rhetorical work here: it’s a magic timestamp that converts old conglomerate instincts into something that sounds like innovation. When Messier says “customers all over the globe,” he’s not describing a market so much as announcing a worldview in which regulation, culture, and language are friction to be engineered away.

The most revealing clause is the last one: “all kinds of technology.” It’s deliberately nonspecific, a hedge disguised as ambition. By refusing to name formats or channels, the statement sells adaptability while keeping the strategy unfalsifiable in the moment. That’s classic boom-era executive speech: grand enough to justify aggressive acquisitions, vague enough to survive the next pivot.

Context matters because Messier’s tenure at Vivendi became a cautionary tale of dot-com-era overreach. Read today, the quote captures the seduction of convergence: the belief that being everywhere, through everything, is a strategy rather than a bet.