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AOL to be Split into 4 Units
unsupported writes "AOL is apparently dividing into four units to provide a clear direction for each. The four divisions are as follows: Audience (Advertising, and AOL IM, Moviefon, Mapquest, Netscape.com), Access (dial-up, highspeed), AOL Europe (for the foreigners), and Digital Services (Premium services, phone and music subscription). "
Maybe if you split the Time and the Warner parts off, you'd have even clearer direction, AOL?
Will cd-r manufacturers be able to keep up?
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
This sets the stage to spin the pieces off into separate companies, or to sell them.
I doubt AOL-TimeWarner has much AOL left once the "Baby AOLs" are operating a little more independently.
sigs, as if you care.
So now they're just down to AOL, AOL Instant Messenger, AOL TV, Asiaweek, Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks, Atlanta Thrashers, Atlantic Records, Baby Talk, Book-of-the-Month Club, Capitol Records, Cartoon Network, Castle Rock Entertainment, Cinemax, CNN, CNNfn, Coastal Living, Columbia House, Comedy Central, CompuServe, Cooking Light, Court TV, DC Comics, Digital City, eCompany Now, Elektra, EMI, Entertaindom.com, Entertainment Weekly, Family Life, Fortune Magazine, Goodwill Games, Hanna-Barbera, HBO, Headline News, Health Magazine, ICQ, InStyle, Life Magazine, Little Brown, Looney Tunes, Mad Magazine, Money Magazine, MovieFone, Netscape, New Line Cinema, NY1 News, People Magazine, Progressive Farmer, Qwest, Real Simple, Rhino, Road Runner, Southern Accents, Southern Living, Spinner, Sports Illustrated Magazines, Sunset, TBS, Teen People, Telepictures Productions, This Old House, Time Magazines, Time Warner Cable, TNT, Tommy Boy Music, Turner Classic Movies, Virgin Records, Warner Brothers Companies (Movies, Television Network, Video, Music, Stores), and Winamp.
The big whoop is they probably paid some management consultancy group a library of congress sized amount of money to formalize what they were already doing under the guise of a complete management reorganisation.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Restructuring seems to be the way Boards of Directors justifies layoffs, blaming the placement of the "walls" for poor performance, rather than looking at lacking innovation, morale, and business savvy.
Besides the already-commented-about possibility of selling off parts, in this day and age the notion of dividing up divisions of a company differently just seems to fly in the face of the path of the enlightened employer of the 21st century.
By segmenting into distinct groups, you facilitate the blame game and hamper communication. This kind of restructuring certainly isn't what you do to revitalize.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
while defending parents from the horrors of having to monitor their own children!
"In the days ahead, when our transition to a new structure has been completed, we will have a streamlined organization with clear roles and responsibilities"
In other words... "Well try this for a while to see if it works or now, I don't actually have a clue if it will or not". And in reality it is nothing more then a cover for...
"especially at a time like this when we have announced plans for layoffs."
In other words: "CEO bonus here I come!" And I can't leave out this jewel:
"giving each [unit] responsibility for its own operations and financial performance."
So you have developer x in group 1 and group 2 needs developers x skills, but they have to first put in a REQ and get financiall approval or even worse hiring a new person and meanwhile developer x sits around idly. I predict project slowdowns stock dropping and in 12 months a "New Plan".
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I think its mostly to create some buzz amongst the investors and shareholders, who think a reorganization means increased efficiency and therefore huge profits. Plus, it allows for new banners with fancy slogans and missions statements to be hung on the wall, and to keep everyone up to date on the latest corporate slang (a reorganization is really nothing more than lots of little paradigm shifts to better utilize the synergistic capabilities of our capital-index work force, etc)
I don't know what the big deal is, but Microsoft always opposed being split up, yet they should follow suit.
Something like this:
Microsoft OS Inc
Microsoft Office Tech Inc
Microsoft Web tech Inc
Microsoft Consumer Products Inc
Of course it won't happen as Microsoft's OS and Office Tech companies would make all the money, the Web tech and Consumer Products divisions would go bust.
Microsoft opposed being forced into becoming multiple companies. AOL isn't doing that - they are just formalizing internal business units. I think this will be good for them in that it could give VP's more power make decisions independent of the other units. I'm sure Microsoft already does this. Of course, this would make it simpler to split into seperate companies in the future and make it more obvious if that were a good idea.
AOL had live video streams of the presidential debates. You could not see them anywhere on the "plain" Internet. I didn't watch the presidential debates, but I'm sure that a lot of people would like to.
If you're into mainstream content, AOL does give you more than just the free stuff on the Internet. They have the clout to make deals with the mainstream content providers to offer this content.
Doesn't do anything for me personally, but there's some truth to what they claim.
Reorgs provide tax benefits.
See? As always, it's about the benjamins.
EOT.
This is marginally interesting to me for a few reasons:
- AOL was probably the single most influential company in the early days of the online revolution. More people got online in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of AOL than any other company. It wasn't the Internet, and it had problems, but it was still the first step for millions of people. In that regard what happens to AOL is interesting in an anthropological/historical sense.
- The fact that AOL is restructuring themselves means that they are at least attempting to survive. For a few years they've been utterly floundering. The corporate-speak ("I hope to pour a little accelerant on it") is disconcerting, but these restructurings actually take a lot of effort. It's difficult to overstate the amount of inertia that builds up in huge operations like AOL. It will be interesting to me to see if an old giant can get nimble and start delivering what people actually want.
- Although they downplay the possibility of this being a precursor to a split of AOL, I wouldn't be surprised if they're watching to see what each of the divisions do. They may decide to spin one or more of them off or divide the company into two, three or four separate companies. This could be worth watching in light of the difficulties other large, diversified tech companies are having.
Admittedly, this isn't the most exciting Slashdot story in recent memory, but I have a soft spot in my heart for stories about AOL.Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How do you figure that? What exact tax benefits do you think you get from changing around divisions?
No, it's actually:
Conservatives & Liberals: F*cking the country today so our children can fix it tomorrow.