Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner to Spin Off AOL?
image77 writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Time Warner is considering spinning AOL into a separate company via an IPO. You might recall that AOL bought Time Warner for over $100 Billion in 2001, and then went on to lose almost that much in 2002."
FP
first to comment :D aol sucks XD
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
AOL is a dying system. It was first used as a dial up connection with an interesting GUI. this is no longer what the end user wants. They still focus on dial up, versus the exploading broadband arena. IMO this is one of the first steps to its grave. Seperation of the company who's more or less holding it afloat.
AOL? Hahaha you use AOL? damn dude.... I feel sorry for ya.
...stays under the control of Time Warner but ends up going off and doing it's own thing then they should name it "AWOL"...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I mean, if it cost 100 billion, getting $9.99 isn't so bad...
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
AOL buying TW was the greatest travesty of the dot com boom.
--
Toby
Normally I'm skeptical of the market correcting the mistakes it makes, but this appears to be a case that might prove me wrong. The AOL-Time Warner merger sounded like a good idea on paper, but the two companies were already large enough that integrating their services and products was probably too great a hurdle, especially considering the time-frame under which it took place.
Either that or the combined company was horribly mismanaged.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
...who didn't see this coming?
And how will AOL afford all the mail clogging CDs without siphoning off funds from Time Warner?
AOL is being pushed back out the door to live on its own (like a middle-aged chronically unemployed geek being kicked out by mom finally). Oracle is still living under Darth Ellison. Netscape is using Microsoft's engine as an option (in an amazing display of tacit acknowledgement of defeat) even as Firefox continues to batter MSIE market share. If only they'd gotten together years ago...
"You've got queries!"
Oh well.
At least they've still got legions of lusers to rely on... until they finally close their checking accounts to keep AOL from charging them for service they cancelled in writing six times over the course of a year.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
who needs AOL anymore?
thought AOL got the better end of the merger deal because they picked up TW's content?... content is king and always will be... why do you think bit torrent is the most popular thing on the net right now? its the only way we're able to get the content we want.
AOL bought Time Warner, and now Time Warner decides to spin off AOL? Who's the boss of whom here?
home
AOL to spin off CompuServe?
The AOL purchase of Time Warner was just a way for AOL to try to use its share price to turn into something lasting. They knew at the time that their business was heading towards obsolescence. This was rather inevitable.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Time Warner later mentioned that they were sick of their employees spending all day chatting on AIM and claiming they were "beta testing" the next release.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
"AOL bought Time-Warner", while technically correct, is pretty misleading, since Time-Warner management initially had an equal role in the combined company. And "equal" soon changed to "dominant" as it become more and the AOL part would never lived up to initial expectations, and shareholders granted more and more authority to the Time-Warner part.
AOL is still overpriced for dial up. If they want to remain afloat they'll need to lower their prices to compete with Netzero, Netscape, et. al.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
You just know it's all coming back up.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Gees, I must be some kind of genius because I've been saying that for years.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Well, this just proves that money isn't everything. Around the time of the merger, one of the largest corporations on earth was being created. It was the greatest thing to happen to the corner of Wall and Broad in decades. Stock analysts gushed over the seemingly invincible titan.
What on earth happened?
It seems that AOL has lost its unique luster... the early days of the burgeoning internet long since past. The prime days of AOL were seen when there was no other way for Johnny Nontechie to get information from the internet with any kind of ease of use. It, arguably, represented one of the first comprehensive portals accessible to the end-user.
The Internet grew, and AOL stopped being so unique. A failure to diversify and many flawed versions of the AOL software later, its popularity has waned. Time Warner has diversified its Roadrunner offering to add portal features, and so has everybody and their mother....
Absorbing antiquated business models in lateral merger never makes for a good formula unless you plan to do something with the antiquated business model (you know, innovation and the like?). Was it planned to boost Roadrunner's position? Was it a lack of foresight? Who knows.
It will mercifully end soon enough, this failed experiment.
The Crimson Dragon
Does anyone else find it bizarre that throughout the article they keep telling us how old everyone is? And that they tell us twice that this "Parsons" fellow is 57? Why in the hell are the ages -57 and 50, extraordinarily normal ages for executives -of these people at all significant??
Speaking as an aviation enthusiast, I hope they start the spin too low and too slow!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Still quite confusing, though. The two companies were never meant to become one. Their business models are too different.
Is it possible to buy short into an IPO?
Since broadband came about, AOL seems to not address the new technologies. When a companiy refuses to reflect upon new technologies, they are destined to impode upon itself. With the rates AOL has, compared to NetZero (which is a joke of a company name), they just can't compete. If they only had embraced broadband to begin with, than I think AOL would be stronger than ever.
"Holy rusted metal, Batman!"
AOL has been dragging TW downhill ever since they merged.
I look forward to the day when my RoadRunner no longer goes thru 3-5 extra hops in the ATDN.net network to get anywhere.
Pre-merger; 10-14 hops to anywhere in the world.
Currently; 15-18 hops, even inside the US.
And on a more personal note, I'm about to start working for TW, so it'll be nice not to have the AOL baggage.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
It seems that the management under Carly was doing just fine in that regard without the capable assistance of Compaq. They successfully turned themselves into a mediocre clone of Compaq with printer sales. Once they were a force to be reckoned with on instrumentation, Calculators, PDAs, Printers, and of course, computers. With good old Carly at the helm they became an also-ran well before the "merger" with Compaq- the merger just finished the job she started.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If AOL makes enough money with their IPO, maybe they can afford to buy a big media company. :P
Now AOL can go off and die on it's own without hurting TimeWarner...
The Time-Warner guys never like the AOL guys and AOL swallowed a company too bigger than it could handle. Time-Warner is just getting rid of them.
--SolidGold
Everything you know is wrong. Or more accurately, inaccurate.
The answer is "almost nothing". Allow me to explain.
The market has two main options: (1) ISP provider and Google or Yahoo! as the launching point of your WWW experience or (2) ISP provider and AOL as the launching point of your WWW experience. Option #1 costs about $30 with DSL and $20 with dialup. Option #2 costs about $40 with DSL and $20 with dialup. In the dialup case, AOL provides the dialup.
The trouble here is that option #2 provides no significant value over option #1. If you use DSL, you must pay an additional fee to get access to the AOL portal. Yet, what does AOL provide over Google or Yahoo!? Almost nothing.
As long as Google and Yahoo! continue to innovate and hire cheap H-1B engineers (while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed), both Google and Yahoo! will destroy AOL.
The future for America's (in every sense of the word, including a preference to hire American engineers) portal will be bleak.
Mozilla.org was started by AOL's Netscape division, as I recall. Are they now independently supported, or will they go under when AOL does?
The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?" Then they supported and continued Netscape's early experiment with open-sourcing the browser and we now have the very successful Mozilla and Firefox browsers, esp. Firefox, that may be eating away at MS's share of the browser market.
Maybe T-W should hang on to Mozilla.org and keep it going, and realize the original goal of merging their powerful media content with the web, like creating a Firefox online movie channel or some such. Why not? They wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in the AOL merger so now they can spend a few million on a reasonable system like Firefox, thunderbird, etc.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
As a seperate entity, they will be forced to take more risks, forcing them to innovate more. Combined with TW, they could afford to stagnate alot longer.
I look forward to seeing what shifts in company direction come out of this. Right now they are just playing catchup in all areas with the real innovators in the industry.
Execute? [Y/N] _
In the years since the AOL/TW merger/buyout the two companies have had numerous chances to unite their collective business models. How hard would it really be to turn AOL into a subcription service that provides access to a massive amount of content - magazines, books, music, television, movies - with tiered access options, one of which would include the old AOL ISP service? Success would be almost guaranteed, after all, the two companies had some of the best marketing departments in the world, given that they both made the majority of their money by convincing people to spend billions of dollars on overpriced entertainment.
This has to be the biggest missed opportunity of all time. If the shareholders were smart they would sieze this last chance to revolt, replace the board with people who have spines, and fire the entirety of the AOL/TW senior management, replacing them with some visionaries who actually deserve to handling a company with so many great possibilities, and not a bunch of worthless cowards afraid to transform the company into the world's first digital entertainment empire.
Wow, that was an impressive display of one-liners and empty quips. If you haven't already, I'd strongly suggest a career in a monthly tech magazine of your picking. You'd fit right in.
[...] even as Firefox continues to batter MSIE market share.
Not even breaking 10% doesn't exactly inspire images of battery. But, hey, whatever gets you those mod points...
That financial transaction was not the greatest travesty.
The greatest travesty was having a 401K plan where the provider designed it in such a way that mainly risky or high-tech (or usually both) mutual funds were available. Then, the unwitting American worker put his life's savings into these funds. After the dot com bust, the savings collapsed by 50% or more (typically).
The rub is that the provider received a kickback from the managers of these mutual funds that collapsed and hence tended to favor these risky funds.
Janus funds is an excellent example.
Even to this day, we still have no laws requiring 401K plan providers to provide only self-directed brokerage accounts that allow the plan participant to invest in any mutual fund (especially good ones).
No one seems to care about the life savings of folks in the American middle class. Certainly, the cowboy running this country does not care.
Come on mods... that wasn't off topic at all. Haven't you seen that stupid AOL ad where the guy's dumping crap on the guy's sandwich?
Sure, it's a dumb commercial: nonetheless, GP asked "why pay another $15" and Parent told him why. Ergo NOT offtopic.
http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/funds/ericgillin/10 062472.html and this one
Contrary to popular belief AOL as been a really profitable branch of AOL-time Warner for some time.
Some people will get a big surprise when they see that AOL alone is really underrated by some investors who cant read numbers. This is going to be the next Google , and maybe there is laways the possibilities that some other bigger company try to buy them out to get at the clients they have.
BetaNews ran a story about this, which says that Time Warner had considered spinning off AOL but decided that "it would be unnecessary to do so at this time."
Story at: http://www.betanews.com/article/Time_Warner_Consid ered_AOL_Spinoff/1116616630
R.Mo
Time Warner is the worst thing that ever happened to AOL. Yes, you heard me right. The moment Parsons stepped in, AOL lost its soul. Parsons was more than happy to sell out to Microsoft, putting the final nail in Netscape's coffin and killing off the possibility of a future in which tens of millions of AOL subscribers would have a Gecko-based browser embedded in their client software. If it weren't for TW and Parsons, IE's market share might be somewhere around 50-60% today.
I'd love to see AOL spun off, and Steve Case put back at the helm. I'd love to see Bill Gates dartboards put back in place at AOL. I'd love to see a plucky independent AOL taking stabs at Microsoft on a daily basis again. Let's see it happen. If this breakup happens, as far as I'm concerned it'll be good riddance to Time Warner.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
So you have a bunch of disjoint units some doing well and some doing poorly. Were I a shareholder I'd want to see the whole thing broken up.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I say good! I've been afraid ever since the merger they'd make Road Runner users like me use there God aweful software.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
+5 The Truth Hurts..
I hear the Canopy group is looking at aquiring controlling interest in AOL; Web Browsing licences will only be $699 if you buy them before they file suit.
Compaq to spin off HP... you read it here first.
.sig
Audioscrobbler's http://www.audioscrobbler.com/ latest plugin count has Winamap beating iTunes by almost 3:1. Here's the most recent count, if you're interested. http://www.audioscrobbler.com/development/graphs.p hp
"No one seems to care about the life savings of folks in the American middle class. Certainly, the cowboy running this country does not care."
More about U.S. government corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
The U.S. government is being sold to the highest bidder.
# cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama /dev/mem: Operation not permitted
cat:
When it become quite clear that Netscape was worthless to AOL, they made it open source. The open source community looked at the code and rewrote it from the ground up. So, Mozilla is loosely descended from Netscape. They may be partially funded by AOL, but they are not owned by AOL.
I had an AOL Account that I Used for picking up Chicks While I was stationed In Upstate NY, in my late teens (laugh if you must, but it worked, and a few were even over 18). I Switched a basically webmail service for 10 bucks a month, because I had a lot of people to keep in contact with via the e-mail address. After I transfered to Hawaii, I went on deployment via submarine. While I was underway, somehow someone got ahold of my account information. They proceeded to dial in, and run up $500 a month in charges a month, for 2 months. When I called AOL, and pointed how retarted it is to think that someone who never had more then a $10 bill, to suddenly go up to $500, they argued that point. When I Pointed out I was deployed via submarine during the times of the dial ups, they informed me Navy Vessels now had phone access, and I Still Could have done it. When I Pointed out that was ridicilous, and anyways I WAS IN A STEEL TUBE UNDER THE WATER... they Still refused to rectify the situation, and return the money, that I dearly needed to get drunk in my current exotic locale. Thankfully 2 Chargebacks fixed the problem. That is the last dealing I Had with AOL.
Yes I know their a lot of spelling errors in the previous message, and no I did not preview, my bad
I see it more as TW destroyed AOL with mailice and self destructive spite. AOL with full ability to distribute TW content would indeed have lived up to expectations. TW made themselves dominant and eliminated the world's largest ISP as potential competition by NOT letting AOL distribute said content. AOL under TW has not only stagnated, they have fallen behind. It's destruction is a shameful reflection on TW's missmanagement. If you can't make money with AOL style control over the largest online group in the world, there's something seriously wrong with you or you intended to destroy it from the beginning.
Old media won, for a while. Of the new media companies, AOL, M$, Napster, MP3.COM, only M$ is left and they are owned. Who else is there to compete against the 4 big music publishers and the one or two movie publishers? Creative commons will undo the greedy morons.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
1) Buy short into an IPO for aol.
2) ???
3) HUGE PROFITS!
My hacked site
I live in the sticks, dialup is all I can get. and I got sick of paying twenty bucks a month when so many are offering it for half, so I decided to go with Netscape's bargain offer.
It's not even worth it at half the price of "regular service." they DO NOT support anything besides windows and even if you are lucky enough to get on you still get to deal with AOL's sucklicious proxy nest. the only way I was able to reach secure sites like paypal and my bank from behind my IP Cop router was to create a tunnel to a third party server and connect from there, somehow AOL has managed to completely screw up this part of the service.
They don't support Mozilla or Firefox or any of their own products and in fact they have these special applets that REQUIRE you to run windows lest you be forever unable to reconnect after the first time some tiny thing goes wrong with your account.
I never would have believed anyone could screw up simple DIALUP service so incredibly badly... until I dropped them and tried Netzero. But that's a whole 'nother rant, suffice to say I am back to paying twenty bucks a month to a local ISP for dialup and I'm not likely to be complaining about the price anytime soon.
I agree it would be nice to see AOL take a chunk or two out of MS's hide, but I doubt that will happen. AOL is a middleman, and if there's one thing that technology's drive to efficiency hates is middlemen.
There is content, there are content users. Anything that gets between those two will eventually be pushed aside.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
An AOL rep called me with an offer to sign up (for full disclosure, I signed up to get an unrelated freebie and promptly called 24 hours later to cancel). They touted their software's ability to automatically check up on my computer every two weeks and clean it. I told them that I'm head of an IT department and I can damn well keep my own computers clean.
Just based on that call, AOL sounds like Symantec, Big Brother style; I give you permission to snoop around and *hope* that you take off only what's bad. AOL doesn't know what they're supposed to be anymore, and their base business model won't succeed now that people understand that AOL != Internet (if only we could get those people to understand that IE != Internet). People know now that gullible is, in fact, in the dictionary, and there's no real reason to pay AOL for their craptastic "services".
Sorry AOL, but looks like you're going the way of Enron and CherryOS.
You also Randomly Capatalized words in your Sentences. Try not to Do That.
"Lose" spelled correctly in Slashdot story.
I was just waiting for the Superhero Themed AOL "Browser".
Always did give me a shiver.
AOL owns Batman?, Superman, Bugs, Daffy, and no not FogHorn Leghorn? NooooOOooooooOooo
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Of the new media companies, AOL, M$, Napster, MP3.COM, only M$ is left and they are owned.
:)
Damned root kits
hawk
I wish they would fix up the jabber.org server, it disconnects people constantly. I would love to recommend and switch people to jabber, but I can't in this state, and I can't have them change servers every few months like I've done :-(