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Why Time Warner was Forced Into AOL's Arms

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the opening-days-of-the-internet-century dept.

There's a front page story in the Washington Post today about how media giant Time Warner blew it on the Internet despite a huge and expensive company-wide online effort, while AOL, despite many flaws and stumbles, came out of nowhere and became a huge Internet force within five years. This is an excellent cautionary tale of business shifts in what Steve Case calls "the Internet Century."

2 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. "...the day the world changed..." by Jack+William+Bell · · Score: 5
    Five years ago, the suggestion that AOL would be a dominant partner in such a deal would have been ridiculous. Three years ago, it would have been amusing. Last week, everyone said it was inevitable.

    The above quote comes from what is probably the most insightful paragraph in the article. AOL was always a loser in everyone's mind! A laughable parody of what an ISP should be, more focused on marketing and on mailing out those damn disks than on providing customer service. Does anyone else remember what happened to Usenet when AOL added a thousand Usenet groups to its own BBS system without explaining to its users what that really meant? The flamewars that followed were legendary...

    "The day Yahoo went public was the day the world changed," said Phil Anderson, who teaches Internet strategies at Dartmouth College's business school. "Yahoo was nothing. It was a Web site. But suddenly it had a valuation of $800 million. And people said, 'Ohmygod, what would the largest online company be worth if Yahoo's worth all that?'"

    Yahoo was started by a couple of stereotypical geeks. So was Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Sun and (lets face it) Microsoft. (That is if you give a little leeway to the definition of 'geek'.) But it always seems to be the Marketroids who win in the end...

    We geeks change the world because we understand the world's most fundamental source of change: Technology. Sometimes we even understand how and why technology will affect society. But the Marketroids reap the benefits because they understand how to manipulate the masses! They know how to play on fear, greed and sex to sway opinion. We might think ourselves better because we are more 'pure', but that doesn't get us the girls.

    Historically this has always been true. Occasionally we remember geeks like Aristotle and Da Vinci, but we tend to point to the Generals, the Kings and the Emperors as the focus of change. Not to the inventors of the technologies they used to create that change or which forced the change upon them. We remember the wars, not the peace. The leaders, not the creative types who designed their palaces and built their weapons.

    I truly detest the thought that Steve Case might be remembered as a leader of the "Internet Century". It really chaps my balls! But it seems invetable that names like Torvalds, Berners-Lee, Englebart, Rheingold, Metcalf and (add your favorite geek god here) will, at most, rate no more than a footnote or two. Perhaps there is a way for us to forestall this fate, but first we will have to break the anti-social habits that make us powerless in society at large.

    It is an interesting dichotomy: On the one hand the technophiles are the point-source of social change. On the other they are the people least likely to be identified with that change. All because we cannot lie with a straight face. William Gibson put it best -- "The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent."

    Jack

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    Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
  2. There's a lesson here for Linux developers by Tim+Behrendsen · · Score: 5

    Anyone who hasn't tried one of those infamous AOL floppies should try it some time. Those floppies are the reason AOL dominated. They were entirely self-contained: you didn't need TCP/IP, or even the modem set up. You plugged them in, they figured everything out, and boom! Joe User was online.

    Many would like to see Linux be where Windows is. Many have even claimed that Linux is "easier to use than Windows" (which is laughable, but I swear someone claimed it in a post). The lesson here is that the vast majority of people don't care about how the underlying software works. They just want to use the darn thing.

    Unfortunately, many Linux advocates worship at the altar of "oooooh, what a beautiful kernel" when the average user says "OK. I see a pretty desktop; what can I do with it?" Unfortunately, in the case of Linux for the average user, not much compared to the applications under Windows.

    The lesson is that people will forgive almost endless technical inferiority, but they won't forgive something that is not useful to them. It's all about the content/applications. And until Linux gets at least some applications that are superior to the equivalents in Windows, it will never make any inroads into the desktop world.


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