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."
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.
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
Technically, it was an acquisition. In practice it was a merger...that is now unmerging.
In some ways it's similar to HP's purchase of Compaq, where Compaq management ended up running HP into the ground (after running Compaq into the ground).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
In what parallel universe did people not know that AOL, and every other dot bomb, had an overinflated stock? I am going to assume that every reasonably-intelligent person knew that AOL was overvalued, and the only question in everyone's mind at the time was how much money am I going to make before this ship sinks.
At the time I stated on more than one occasion that Time-Warner was making an incredibly stupid gambit in assuming that merging with AOL would pay off. They felt that the stock bump from being attached to an "Internet company" would be worthwhile.
Admittedly there were people on Slashdot whose only concern was that AOL-Time-Warner would co-opt the Internet or something equally retarded. I wouldn't place them in the category of reasonably-intelligent people.
I think what surprised the Time-Warner management wasn't that AOL wasn't a stellar asset, but just how much of a liability they were. They all expected an opportunity to profit off of being an Internet company, but just how much money AOL was losing and how quickly it was losing it caught them off guard. They had been looking for a get-rich-quick scheme and found a lead weight.
What's really impressive about AOL is the amount of time they've been willing to lose money on projects: Winamp, Mozilla, AIM, AOL Server, and national POTS banks. They really stay at things despite never seeing any return from them.
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 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.