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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."
"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.
Their effort to compete with NetZero is accomplished with their own Netscape dialup service. It might still be a good idea to lower the mainline AOL prices to be in better competition with other dialup providers.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
(of Winamp, Gnutella, & WASTE fame)
was a bigger travesty.
The man was pure gold and the software he touched became golden too
So what did AOL do? They put him on such a short leash that he quit.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Don't mark this guy Insightful. AOL is actually a big money maker for Time-Warner. Take a look at the numbers. Just because they don't make as much as they used to, they're still in the black. They actually make a lot of money, and they don't have to "siphon" funds from the parent company.
Do your researching before spouting lies and half-truths.
Justin has some money tucked away for retirement, but he's far from rich. He was paid in dot-com boom shares, and after the bust his shares were worthless like the rest of us. During that time you take some losses and some gains and just hope you come out ahead. I had fewer shares than most people of that time and I came out ahead of people who had a lot more shares.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Back a long time ago, September was when new students would log on to usenet for the first time and it took a long time to get them to post productively. Once AOL got on usenet, there was a constant influx of new people. (Plus whatever you want to say about AOL users)
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Don't look now but itunes already plays video.
Then you go on to praise Firefox, which uses said "bloated pile of buggy crap". Make your mind up. As for the libraries, AOL used Gecko for CompuServe 7 and AOL for Mac OS X. It was mainly for political reasons that they didn't use it for the main AOL client for Windows. Netscape also created a mail program for AOL but AOL decided to write their own instead. The politics in that place were crazy.
Stop spouting rubbish. The Firefox project was started by David Hyatt and Blake Ross, both of whom worked for Netscape. Today the project is led by Ben Goodger. Would like to guess who he used to work for? Firefox was started by Netscapers but outside of AOL management.
fyi, firefox does not come from netscape source. they are both based on code from the mozilla foundation's code which develops (netscape switched from their code base to mozilla code base when they bought mozilla few years ago). this is reflected in that every release of netscape is the previous release version of mozilla. firefox is just a streamlined web browser derived from mozilla as well, but it is an independant project not under the pervue of time-warner.
as for winamp, netscape, and mozilla, they were all independant corporations at one point that time warner bought up to try to keep aol afloat. at least they got mozilla and winamp, which properly developed, could be even better than they are now, especially if not hindered byt the stigma and limited usership of aol and it's proprietary nature.
aim is their only original service, but that might not even be true.
winam
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 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.