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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."
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
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
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
... I agree. AOL has by far outlasted its beginnings, and this only because of the "first web generation" (cough) educated to its (double cough) teachings (flashing gif, banner banner. Please click where you normally shouldn't have to click to continue so that you can look at this nice ad first).
In today's market world, when a company (holding) wants to rid itself of its less profitable ventures, it must first isolate it and make it independant from its "parent" inter-financial network. If someone is gaff enough to take the (dangling) bait, great, but if not, it becomes an investment apart, becomes less (investor) interesting, wilts and dies.
We've seen this story countless times over the past few decades, with only the logo that changes.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
One of the reasons that Time Warner wants to spin off AOL (basically get rid of them) is that AOL is one of the stupidest companies I've ever known.
Virtually all of AOL's assets, except for the wildly popular AIM, are worthless: their flagship subscription dialup service was killed by broadband (and a lot of people get broadband from Time Warner...). Netscape was killed by IE and now, Firefox (which came from Netscape's source...). Nullsoft's WinAmp was killed by iTunes, and meanwhile, AOL partners with Apple on iTunes. AIM is pretty much all that's keeping them going, and even that is being threatened (only on the horizon so far, but coming up fast) by XMPP. AIM (with IM, email, weather, news, games, and downloads) is essentially what AOL once was, but it's just all ad-supported now. When AIM goes down the tubes, replaced by Jabber, text-messaging, and h.264 video calling, America Online will be completely dead.
TW understands this. They want to get rid of the liability that's AOL as soon as possible.
Take off every sig. For great justice.