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AOL-Time Warner's Money Pit
ElitusPrime writes: "There's an interesting analysis of the recently released balance sheet net worth of AOL Time Warner. The net worth of the largest media conglomerate on earth has now been slashed by more than one-third. The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the merger never should have happened. But there's some interesting financial analysis to show exactly how bad the merger has been for Time Warner."
Wilco's recent deal with AOL subsidiaries:
It's their least poppy and most experimental effort to date. Which is why Reprise Records rejected it last summer: if the suits don't think you have a hit single, you're S.O.L, no matter how great your album is. Thankfully, after a fall tour and six months of shopping around, Wilco wrested "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" back and sold it to Nonesuch. Both are subsidiaries of AOL Time-Warner, so in an ironic twist, the band was paid twice for the same album by the same company.
pronoblem
Not likely...
First off, Mozilla uses an open source license...while not GPL/LGPL, the idea is the similar. This means that if AOL/Netscape dropped support, someone could always take it up...
But the truth is, Mozilla is one of AOL's biggest hopefuls...it will be taking over as the standard AOL browser and will be used by many companies who want branded browsers and still more that don't want to use IE as their in-house browser (IBM, Sun, etc)...
There was no "money" it was all what is called goodwill. That is what gets recorded on the balance sheet of a company to balance out the diffrence between what you paid for a company and what it's assets are worth. It is supposed to be a measure of the "value of a name".
...coincidentally made earlier today by Will Hutton (a British economist and newspaper editor) about the pointlessness of big money mergers like this.
He produces some very interesting statistics about how they almost always lose money, for example;
The article is really worth a read. Just ignore the, um, inflammatory title!I'm struggling to come to terms with 13 million square feet of office space.
That's substantially over a square kilometer.
It's just under a half-square mile. (10 city blocks by 5 city blocks.)
Of course, the real issue isn't the amount of office space they need, it's that incomprehensible 25% of revenue going into overhead. Not production, but overhead. That's one central office person for every three people who actually produce the product or directly support those who do.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The AOL Software is buggy, bloated, and won't work. They use VPN's and unlike road-runner, you must be signed into the service before you are connected to the internet. Another good reason is that the AOL Backbones are slower than roadrunner.
We've had customers whose computers that just WILL NOT work with AOL's HSD, but with RoadRunner and AOL's BYOA program, they connect to the net just fine. The pricing? The same (Roadrunner + AOL's BYOA = AOL HSD).
Also, something you have to look at is Support. AOL's support is ok...but RoadRunner's is better. If you're having Road Runner problems (e.g., your 31337 child installed a firewall and now you can't connect to the internet) if you call us, we'll be out in a Day...because it's a PC problem...and we support that. AOL will only support via the phone, unless it's a NO CABLE type of work request, then an line tech goes out...who doesn't have working knowledge of computers.
Anyway...from what I've seen Comwaves (who is our biggest competitor up here) uses RoadRunner at their CEO's and a majority of their employee's houses.
I disable sigs...do you?
Just to clarify, most of Mozilla is already under or will soon be (if not everyone who contributed to a particular file has been contacted for approval yet) under the MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license
History does not support your premise.
AT&T, Microsoft, the Rockefellers, and on and on.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
yo, word from the FOOL: Yet more analysis of the AOHellSlimeWarmer dogpile...