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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 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.
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)
AOL bought Time Warner, and now Time Warner decides to spin off AOL? Who's the boss of whom here?
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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.
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...
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
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
Speaking as an aviation enthusiast, I hope they start the spin too low and too slow!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Is it possible to buy short into an IPO?
I have a suspicion "Parsons, 57" and "Miller, 50" are actually their names.
...or so I've been told.
Why in the hell are the ages -57 and 50, extraordinarily normal ages for executives -of these people at all significant??
I'd have to say -57 years is a rather unusual age for an executive. Or for anyone else for that matter.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If AOL makes enough money with their IPO, maybe they can afford to buy a big media company. :P
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.
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.
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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.