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AOL Fight Narrows To Two Players
BucksCountyCycleGeek writes "Now that Yahoo! has dropped out of the race to control AOL, the field of contenders has narrowed to Microsoft and Google. While antitrust issues continue to cloud Microsoft's bid, it is getting pretty clear that AOL wants payment in cash and not Internet stock. While Google has worked with AOL in the past, Microsoft's resources dwarf them for the moment." From the CNN/Money article: "Time Warner accepted AOL's stock when the old line media company agreed in 2000 to be purchased by the Internet service provider, a deal that proved a disaster for Time Warner's stock value. Yahoo! executives also had concerns about the valuation Time Warner was seeking and possible difficulties integrating the two businesses after any deal, a person close to Yahoo! told the paper."
AOL seems rooted in two old-fashioned categories:
1. "The Internet is the web," whoever makes the content wins (I call it the super BBS text file repository)
2. "The Internet is about connecting people together through my rose-colored lenses."
Both business markets are not ally valid anymore. Smaller ISPs seem to gain users by not making themselves visible as the middleman. The more you've noticed your ISP, the more I bet you've been frustrated.
Creating web content is better performed by billions of people than by dozens. CmdrTaco edits an article, but people come here for the +5'd comments. CmdrTaco couldn't get many +5's on his own (maybe -1 Redundants).
The future, to me, is how to collect all those billions of opinions and creations and make it specifically friendly to every individual user.
Google is heading in the correct direction. I let most of my domain names lapse because of Google. Yet they're still not there yet.
The ultimate web company has to be able to give you what you want, immediately, but also correctly give you items you need even if you didn't realize you needed them.
*Targeted ads you really want to see.
*Content that may be different than what you're used to, but still informative or useful to you.
*Access to information by only knowing some vague part of it. Find that TV show from a line or two. Find that song or book the same way.
*Compensate content creators somehow.
AOL is none of these things. They're an online newspaper and amusement park. *Yawn* I wouldn't pay $5 for them.
Plus, how many people "hate" the name over their junk mail and bad cancellation policy?
As for Time Warner stock, would you want a part of Time? Warner? Maybe in 1985.
to have a growing conglomerate ... despite still being profitable it's a dead-end for any potential buyers, the main thing they have going for them aside from their web portal stuff like AIM is a dwindling user base of 56k users when they could've been an expanding userbase of broadband users ... I guess whoever buys them gets millions of $ in profit per month but if the price is something ridiculous like several years of profit at the current rates you gotto wonder how it can be made to grow enough to justify a high price.
I'm not surprised. To me, that says that AOL thinks that buying AOL is going to hurt your stock. If it were a good move, they'd want a piece of the buying company's stock, which would rise after having made such a great acquisition.
Of course, that's not my professional opinion - I Am Not A Stock Broker.
Any chance Google is pursuing AOL just to make sure MS buys them? You know...give'em enough rope and all.
If someone has an AOL account, it means that they don't have a friend in the computer business, in my opinion. Local ISPs almost always give better service, and don't abuse the customer with advertisements. AOL's business depends on customer ignorance, and computer users are rapidly becoming more knowledgeable.
I hope buying AOL is not Google's first huge mistake. Google should offer no more than $6.50 and free soft drinks.
Recently, someone associated with Time Warner (Parsons?) has been putting out a lot of baloney about the value of AOL.
My money's on MS + AOL. I've been saying they'll merge for years. Despite their hatred for each other, they're quite similar. (Maybe that's WHY they've been such fierce competitors?) They both appeal to technologically-illiterate end-users. They both employ nasty business tactics (AOL's usually lean more towards "annoying" on one hand and "shady" on the other; MS's can better be described as "illegal" and "brutal"; all different shades of evil but all evil!). Neither wants to educate their customers. Both want to build 'walled gardens' around the Internet to some degree. And so on.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
If Google ends up owning part of AOL, I would expect them to integrate AIM with Google Talk. Imagine millions of AIM users being forcibly converted to Jabber... *drool*
The providers know that if all it comes down to is an invisible pipe to the Internet, all they can compete on is price and downtime (and in many areas, downtime is hard for them to control). That model makes broadband access a commodity. You may already believe that Internet access is a commodity, but propagating that view is not in the best interests of the broadband providers right now.
Sorry, but Taco doesn't edit anything that I've seen. He posts a link to an article to the homepage. The editors at those respective publications did the editing. Though I, too, visit Slashdot for the +5 comments, I would argue that none of those comments could exist without the far-smaller number of people who did the actual production of the original content (although, admittedly, I am biased.) I tend to agree here, but all this says is that AOL has done a piss-poor job of its original mission, which was creating value for the end user by providing original content through its own tightly controlled channels. AOL's business model should be that of XM Satellite radio. XM is a delivery medium, insofar as it repackages existing content from people like Bill O'Reilly, but it also generates its own original content and it will go further in this direction as time goes on. At its heart, XM is a content company. AOL could have been the same; it could have been the online equivalent of HBO, but for whatever reason it's mostly blown it -- probably because it set its sights too low. It went for the mass market, every-household-is-an-online-consumer market, when it should have realized 1.) that it needed to get on the Web much sooner; and 2.) that the most valuable customers for Web-based services were technically-savvy people, and that they needed to capture that audience before they trying to woo grandma and her digital camera. I don't know. Without getting into specifics, because I don't have them on-hand, from what I've heard Time Warner is pretty much on track as far as where a big media company in America should be right now. There are definitely rough seas ahead for that business, but if anybody's on the ball it's Time Warner.Breakfast served all day!
The logic that you can buy percentages in every part of the computer market is why HP had that disaster with Compaq. Microsoft will be able to buy their way to the top for a little while, but there is a big world out that that never grew up on AOL 56k dial-up. AOL is on the decline- even with MS backing.