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Time Warner to Spin Off AOL?

Posted by timothy on from the concerted-effort dept.

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."

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Technically.... by fm6 · · Score: 5, Informative
    AOL did indeed buy Time-Warner, but it was really a merger. At the time, nobody realized (that they'll admit) how inflated AOL stock was, so it seemed to make sense to structure the merger as acquisition. That allowed them to pay for the merger simply by giving AOL stock to Time-Warner shareholders and renaming AOL as "AOL-Time-Warner".

    "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.

  2. Re:Price Competition by Penguinoflight · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  3. Re:About time, too - by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Informative
    AOL screwing over Justin Frankel
    (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!
  4. Re:Alright... by sabernar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Overpriced at $9.99 by poptones · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.