AOL To Be Purchased By T-Online?

Sique writes "The german newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports on its website, that the german ISP T-Online wants to buy AOL. The article is titled American Dream, but the actual wording is german. Ask the fish for help." There's also the article in Der Spiegel about the potential purchase as well; you can also check out T-Online's site.

Comments

So..

[rf0]

Does that mean they would be called Time Warner Aol T-Online or TWAT for short? :)

Rus

Already denied...

[DarkDust]

According to Heise online this has already been denied by T-Online (sorry, German only).

Basically, what they are saying in that news article is that some spokesman from T-Online claims buying AOL would be "economical nonsense". But T-Online has about 4 billion Euro cash with which they'd like to buy some companies. And while T-Online is the biggest online provider of Europe it is largely unknown outside of Europe, thus buying AOL would make sense to some people because T-Online likes to expand and conquer markets outside of Europe.

Pretty soon you'll be hearing...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Sie haben Post (You've got mail)

Re:Not surprising...

[gfxguy]

Yeah, but that's ALL they did... it was a name change only, it's not like the company split.

As an employee, I wish they would - AOL consumed Time Warner because they had artificially high stock prices and decided it was time for something with real value. They've been dragging us down ever since.

Don't get me wrong - the press is really hard on AOL. Yes, customers are leaving, but they still have the most customers and charge the highest price. They are still making tons of cash, they're just making less and less of it.

While I wish the company would split, I don't see how another ISP could buy out the largest ISP in the world. Wishful thinking.

Full disclosure: I don't read German, I didn't read the article, so maybe I'm missing something.

Please release IM, let IM go...

[markxsd]

Surely 80% of the Instant Messaging market is the only asset AOL have that's worth anything to anyone?? Apart from that, what else is there? Millions of Joe 6 DDoS drones... Netscape seems to have been abandoned, it's worth nothing now, if it was ever worth anything in the first place...

If this is more than an American Dream, let's hope that an outcome will be that AOL will loosen their grip on the IM market. The closed model they've been trying to enforce has been holding back a world of possibilities for Jabber and IM client development.

english translation

[ponxx]

by yours truly... in a rush so don't complain if it's not 100% accurate (apologies for the dodgy english as well):

"American Dream"

T-online has lots of money and high ambitions, one option is the take-over of AOL

For years it was a duel that electrified the internet public. Deutsche Telekom with T-online vs. the conqueror from the US: AOL.

The opponents used all means to fight for markets in europe, including law-suits, dumping prices and advertising campaigns. A Particular twist was added when the (german) media company Bertelsman headed by Thomas Middelhoff, worked together with the Americans.

Today, all has changed. Since Spring 2000 Bertelsmann is not involved with AOL anymore and Middelhoff is a partner with Investcorp in London.

He searches for investment opportunities in the entire world and has particularly good contacts to the US, where he is on the board of the NYT. From the deals of the 90s he still knows many people at Time Warner, who euphorically bought AOL 4 years ago but is now unhappy with the online-business.

Time Warner already dropped AOL from the name and are apparently thinking of seeling large parts of the company. The most likely candidate is according to sources of the SZ the T-online AG who has been striving for international expansion for a while, but not achieved its aims in this area.

One idea is for the germans to hold 80% of AOL shares while 30% stay with Time Warner, a cooperation that would change the media-landscape. It would happen due to the deal-making of Middelhoff.

It is the old Bertelsmann Boss and now Investment banker who has aided the talks between T-online and Time-Warner. Information from T-online sources suggest that a meeting between TW boss Richard PArsons and T-online Boss Thomas Holtrop has already occured.

The suggested price-tag is ~1 Bn Dollars. That's a long way away from the former astronomical valuations of the company once promoted by Middelhoff friend Steve Case.

At it's maximum AOL bought Time Warner for 112 Bn Dollar. Recently AOL lost customers, currently there are about 25 Million.

It woudl be easy for Holtorp and Col to pay for the deal. T-online still has 4 Bn Euros. This capital needs a targe so that publicly traded T-online corp can achieve its ambitious growth targets.

Middelhoff was not available for comment. A t-online spokes-person didn't want to commen on the rumours: "Every quarter we're asked "What are you doing with your money?"

Fundamentally there are two major parts of strategy. One is inorganic growth, by purchases and by waiting on consolidation of the market,.

A deal with AOL would have the particular advantage that T-online would get a foot-hold in the american market. Co-operations with sister-firm T-mobile are important as the companies work together on "T-Zones" where T-online supplise contents, which could be important for the US investments of T-mobile.

The Project AOL is top secret. A final decision has not been made. There are risks, in particular in terms of regulators. In Germany AOL never made major inroads. It is likely that after a merger AOL germany would disappear.

On Tuesday T-online has declared a quarterly profit for the first time. T-online now has 12.9 Mn customers, 9% more than last year. 4/5 of these live in Germany, so it's time for a jump. Yes, t-online is on the look-out says Holtrop, and it would not be years until he has something to announce...

They're all alike (was: Re:hacker haven ...)

[Qbertino]

AOL got security? What's that? An inhouse media player replacement?

Honestly, when it comes to security or any other area that requires basic brain function I'd say the big ISPs are a all the same: Utterly useless.

It's countless times I've called the T-Online Hotline, asked if their mail server was down or the TDSL dialin node was down or some other informal question and every time I've gotten something like this:

Blockhead:"What's your error message?"

Me:"I don't think my error messages are of any use to you."

Blockhead:"What Mailer do you use?"

Me:"*SIGH* K-Mail."

Blockhead:"We only support Outlook or Netscape."

[Meanwhile down in Hell: Satan marks up another Eternity Candidate]

Me:"I know.(I'm not gonna explain to him that E-Mail is a Service while Outlook and Netscape are Mailers and what that all means) I actually just wanted to know if you Mailserver is down."

Blockhead: "What Windows do you use?"

Me: "I use Linux."

Blockhead: "Oh. Well, we don't support Linux." (NOTE THE SIGNIFICANCE: We're in Germany, so he's actually heard the word 'Linux' before)

[Back in Hell: Satan marks Mr. Blockhead up for extra special skinning, boiling and chainsaw subdividing treatment upon arrival.]

Me: "I know.(I'm certainly NOT gonna explain the difference between an Internet Service and an OS to him) I just wanted to know if you Mailserver is down... Could I speak to second level please?"

Blockhead: "Well, all I can say is that due to our troubletickets the Mailserver is up and running and second level won't tell you anything different."

Me: "Thank you very much".

*KLICK* *Duuuuu* (german dialtone)

I seriously doubt it is _any_ better with AOL right now.

Re:They're all alike (was: Re:hacker haven ...)

[Shakrai]

I don't mean to pick on you, but when they ask what you're running, humor them and say "Windows XP".

It's the principal of having to jump though hoops to report an outage on a commercial-grade account that my company pays several hundred dollars a month for. I do feel bad for the Level 1 techs themselves (I used to be one), but not the company that hires them.

I had a similar problem with a Verizon ISDN circuit once. My router (Cisco 776) was reporting an error of "Error 3 - no Route" every time it tried to dial. The idiot that I spoke to told me "We'll send someone out to test the line, but if there aren't any problems, we are going to charge you".

They dispatched someone who did loopback tests and pronounced the line clean and functional. I told them I would try a spare router (another 776) the next day and see if it worked or not -- I wasn't discounting that it could be our equipment, even though I doubted it. No shock, the spare router had the same error message.

They then proceeded to tell me it was my configuration and they didn't support my router (they'd be too happy to support it for $75/hr). I told them this was bullshit -- said configuration had worked fine for years, and wasn't changed prior to the router not working.

This went back and fourth for the next two days (at one point they even claimed that they LOST my ticket and all the notes attached to it) before (after yelling at nearly every person I talked to -- every shread of patience I had was gone at this point) I got a co tech on the line who worked with me on solving the problem (she had me initiating ISDN calls to various numbers while she traced them). Turns out, somebody changed the reroot order in one of their tadem switches (? that means nothing to me, but I'm not a telco weenie) and that caused the calls to disappear into the ether. Why they didn't make this connection earlier is beyond me. If one of my setups stops working the first thing I do is look at anything that has been changed over the last couple of days....

By this point it had been down for 72 hours. I had three different tickets open on this issue before I finally got the knowledgeable CO Tech on the phone. She was helpful and actually knew what she was talking about. Every other idiot told me the problem was on "my end", accused me of "not knowing how to configure your own equipment", (my retort to that being "I guess Cisco's CCNP certification is overrated then"), and "We'll fix it, but it'll cost $75/hr." Three weeks after this problem was solved we received an invoice for the initial visit that did not solve or even diagnosis the problem. Needless to say, we did not pay said invoice...

It's even more amusing to me that the little Mom & Pop ISP I worked for could go three years without a major outage (the outage that did occur was due to a car hitting a telephone pole outside of our building -- beyond our control) yet major national ISPs with (for all intents and purposes) infinite resources can't manage the same feat, even for their commercial customers. The situation has stabilized somewhat now, but initially the DSL account in question would go down at least once every two weeks for half an hour or so. And that doesn't count the little 30 second "hiccups" that occurred from time to time.

I did eventually speak with the manager of the tech support and got a satisfactory answer out of him -- too few techs employed for the number of calls, company refusing to give out another contact number for non-tech support problems, stressed out customers blaming his people, etc etc. We had quite the mutual rant session for awhile.

Bottom line: I understand outages occur and they are beyond the control of the avg guy at tech support. Just don't read to me from your sheet about router lights and operating systems when you have a known outage on your screen and an estimated time of repair for said outage. If you do, I'm going to rip you a new one, and rip your supervisor a

The Register got the story (short)....

[DerOle]

.. in English. See it here

D.Telekom CEO denies T-Online in talks on AOL

[saddino]

So it appears we have an official denial now (as reported by Forbes this morning).