Perlmania For WebTV's hyperactive founder, never growing up is the best revenge. By Janice Maloney Armed with a fistful of colored markers, Steve Perlman launches himself at the whiteboard - again. Assembled behind him in the Mountain View, California, offices of WebTV, a dozen employees and consultants issue a low, collective groan as he furiously starts drawing little green houses, satellite dishes, box-shaped broadcast TV stations, and programming companies, all interconnected to a cartoon depicting the Internet as a cloud.
Some people let their pens drop.
Others, who only seconds before were perched attentively, fall back on a soft black leather sofa and squish into place for the long haul. This could take a while. Perlman, facing the board, is oblivious. He scribbles and chats with himself, erasing things, adding buildings, moving the cloud, using a red marker to make dotted lines that seem to connect everything. He's sketching out the broadband future of interactive TV, and about four minutes into it he gets so excited that one listener jokingly accuses him of getting high on fumes from the markers.