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Time Warner To Be Split Into Four Parts?
Shakrai writes "CNN Money is running a story titled Icahn eyes Time Warner break-up. Carl Icahn is a fairly well known investor who is pushing to break the Time Warner empire into at least four different business units. While his motivation seems to stem from business interests -- he thinks it will work out better for Time Warner in the long run -- I thought it raised an interesting point of discussion. Will the vertically integrated media empires that control content creation, content distribution, internet access and the news media become the Ma Bells of the 21st century? What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?"
Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street. So why are so many companies now rushing to get unhitched? Also, is this outbreak of corporate divorces good for shareholders, or should I sell my stocks now?
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What can be done? Break ALL of these companies up, Microsoft included (like it should have been years ago). That's how! Until then, the Bullshit DMCA Takedowns and Frivolous Lawsuits No One Can Afford To Fight will run rampant.
Yeah, Carl Icahn's fairly well known. In other news, the faeces of the species Ursus Ursus is often discovered in arboreal settings, and it is believed that a German chap in a house in Rome is titular head of the organisation known as the "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church".
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I guess if AOL is going to be set free, and probably aquired, Netscape will also suffer its final fait too... i can imagine that it will evntually get killed off , marking the end of a once great Internet company.
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They form AOL-Time-Warner-Tron!
(Ted Turner likes to play the head.)
Ti, Me, War and Ner.
Pah! Wasn't too hard was it?
This is just Catching up with the past isn't it? From what I've read the Aol merger never went very well and most folks thought they should have been blocked by the government anyway.
I've always thought they were putting too many different colored eggs in one basket
The larger a company is, the less it competes on quality and innovation, and the more it competes on price and muscle. Smaller companies are more agile and can change more quickly.
My personal opinion is that Icahn is pushing this for simply financial reasons. Quite simply, Time Warner has money making divisions, and others are dead weight that should jettisoned. By splitting them up, an investor ends up with some kind of stock split amongst the resulting companies. They then sell off the loser stocks and put that money back into the good portions. This would be a great way to kill off AOL once and for all. AOL is the only division I know of that's dead weight, but there could be others. I'm really just guessing here. MY point is that Icahn is doing this for money reasons. It's the only reason why he would, and neither the article nor the submitter make any mention of this, which is extremely short sighted.
However, regardless of the financial motivations, I completely support a break up of any company as large as this, purely because it benefits consumers with competition. Also, while a merger usually ends up in "eliminating redunancies" in jobs, a break up will usually put those "redundancies" back and open up at least a few new jobs to fill.
No brainer really... get the sledgehammers out and start breaking!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm a former GTE customer. From a customer service and quality standpoint they were the worst company I've ever dealt with. Every time I had to deal with them they botched it.
Since they merged with Bell Atlantic and became Verizon, I'm fairly happy with them. They adopted the policy (for their customer service reps, anyway) that one way or another they wouldn't stop working until your problem was resolved.
Their prices are too high, but at least they fix whatever you tell them is wrong.
But Icahn is just trying to "flip" them, as you would a piece a furniture you got at a garage sale and put on Ebay.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
And I'm not talking about the monopoly issue decades ago. A few years ago AT&T split into four companies voluntarily, including AT&T Wireless, Cable, Broadband, and Consumer Services Units. It ended up a bad idea, but then maybe they would have done much worese if they hadn't done the split. I think Wireless at the time was the only profitable one.
That said, TW hasn't really taken advantage of "synergy" opportunities enough to benefit from having it all in one company. If the problem is that it takes too long for the behemoth to move, then maybe this is a good idea.
Alex.
Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street.
Not really so weird. Boards and execs have little to do but cook up a buy, merger or divestiture. It is self justification for their existance. But what a waste of money.
The truth is the rich at the top want to keep one part of the company and cash out another and now realize the merger was stupid. My guess is AOL has been loosing too many customers under the new management and instead of dealing with the synergy and management issues they are going to cut AOL back out on their own.
It is too bad short term greed and short sightedness were not the only traights you need on a good board of directors, if so America would be rich.
not GTE, sorry.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Pff, technical innovation in media being so important that vertical integration is necessary? Surely not. If you look at real, practical benefits to people large scale engineering has more tangible benefits than innovation in media, and gets a lot less exposure or funding. Media and entertainment is a time sink more than anything, and you could argue that it's effects mean that people now are less developed in the arts than they were 60 years ago. Although admittedly there will be a sliding scale ranging from those who use computers and the internet for learning and active interests, to those who only surf for pr0n.
Split into four parts, eh?
Tim: for people called Tim
e w: for disgusting things
arn: the Access Research Network, apparently.
er: for uncertain things?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Cable or DSL,
Cable or DSS,
CNN or Foxnews or MSNBC or the web or all of the above,
Artists dont HAVE to sign with Warner Music, there are many other lables, or Indy. Same with movies
As far as online content goes, Apple/Yahoo/Napster/google and others in that ilk are eating AOL/Warners lunch
The real Ma Bells of our time are the **AAs that really act in abuse of their monopoly.
...seem to suffer from the same problem - although they run the full range of medial production, none of them seem to be able to effectively merge the different parts of the company to produce any great result.After all, Time Warner have a huge back catalog of music and film sitting there, but they've provided no means for customers of AOL to access any of it. Maybe they're working on that, i dunno, but all these big merged conglomerates like Sony BMG, Time Warner, none of them are visibly making any real efforts to do things involving the full spectrum of business interests they cover.
:(
I always wonder if it's because despite being "merged" on paper, internally they still run as separate businesses with all the competing and territoriality that implies...
Game dev and music blog
Yet equally large companies have a much greater scope for innovation :
1). They have much larger turnover, and thus a much larger budget for R&D.
2). They have a much larger consumer base that already identifies with their products as of quality, and thus the unit cost of the R&D investment is *much* smaller than that of small companies
3). They have greater incentive to get those last few percentage points of market share that make them a de factor monopoly - as it's easier for them than for a smaller company.
In addition, given the 'leap-frogging' of companies in market share that is possible within information industries (see google), there is an even greater incentive for them to innovate as, just beacuse the competition is behind you today, they could easily be kicking your ass in a few months.
Thus, the information age gives bigger companies both a greater scope *and* a greater incentive to invest in R&D.
There is no dependent public service on Time Warner. All they things they do, especially in media, can't be considered in the same way that the monopoly of AT&T and their FCC and PUC/state-governed telephony was.
These two aren't equal; they aren't congruent, they aren't even parallel.
Time Warner's broadband properties are not a utility, like water, sewer, electricity, or natural gas-- things you can't live without. They don't have the same history, the same economics, the same monopoly control, the same easement and right-of-way capital assets, and so on.
Therefore, garbage-in, garbage-out. The comparison is null, and it is, unfortunately moot.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This does this mean that the new split off and to be aquired AOL divsion and the community will finally stop using the open source AOLserver with its embedded TCL support. Its used on a number of core AOL sites and also supported by OpenACS.
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He said that according to his calculations, he would get AOL for free in a break up.
Cheers! -- Richard
"What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?"
Start by making fewer assumptions...
Assumption #1: Technological innovation as you perceive it actually happens.
Assumption #2: Consumers are protectable and/or need to be protected.
Assumption #3: Consumers want current content.
Assumption #4: Consumers are the ones being protected.
TV was called the 'boob' tube, for good reason, long before the phrase 'innovative technology' was coined. You seem to think content mega-control by corporations is new on the scene...it's not.
Consumers aren't quite the idiots you think they are - by your logic, a small group of people enjoying an ad-hoc musical performance in Central Park are neither consumers, nor are they being exposed to 'content'...wrong. Just one example - there are hundreds more. Point is, consumers can protect themselves, thank you very much.
As for protecting anyone...the corporations are the ones interested in protection.
Despite your fantasies, most technological innovation comes from good old fashioned war. Faster information gathering; better medical procedures; increased creature comforts...the biggest upswings in tech advances have always been associated with some type of major military activity.
Real innovations occur as distanced events in terms of any form of consumerism or content protectionism, and they will never be subject to any threat (first amendement or business model related) that is simply based in the marketplace. Just ain't gonna happen...
"It is too bad short term greed and short sightedness were not the only traights you need on a good board of directors, if so America would be rich."
Wait a second... America isn't rich?
Not to defend AOL or anything but you are wrong that AOL is the only dead weight in Time-Warner. AOL supplies over a billion $ a year in profit back to Time Warner. Not to mention the 11% of Google's business they supply. Certainly, AOL is not the cash machine it once was but they are far from dead. They are now shifting their focus from a member-centric model to an ad supported model. If you don't think that will work out for them then you'd better sell all of your Google and Microsoft stock because that is exactly their plans for the future too.
The merger was probably never a good idea but it was made worse when the two architects of the new company lost their focus shortly after the merger. With those two out of the picture the suits took over and the results are history.
Who can say what would have happened if the merger hadn't taken place but I think Time Warner would have been in a lot of trouble. The magazine business was losing ad money to the internet and don't get me started about their movies... Little Nicky, that stoopid Eddie Murphy space movie, please... The only thing that was making money was music and even that went to hell a few years later. That company was and is run by a bunch of greedy old school suits who have no clue what the real public wants or needs. They finally did get lucky with the HP and LOTR movies but I doubt if they could have done those without the money AOL was kicking in.
The best thing that could happen would be for the company to be split up. Then each new company could stand or fall on it's own and not be held back or propped up by the losing divisions. Maybe AOL will get picked up by someone who actually knows what the internet is...
AOL is the only division I know of that's dead weight, but there could be others. I'm really just guessing here. You write 3-4 paragraphs espousing your views, then in the middle of it you negate it all by admitting that you're just guessing. Nice. Despite AOL's loss of customers it still has a larger free cash flow than any other division. That has not changed despite the loss of dial-up subscribers (where AOL has traditionally had its largest profit margin). TWX got rid of/sold Warner Music because it had such a pile of debt. Time Inc, the magazine publisher, is or should be next on the chopping block. Their debt levels compared with their income is fairly low. The movie studios do well, but it is fair more cyclical and subject to the studio putting out a bad movie or two. Next to AOL's revenue, only Time Warner Cable really delivers on cash and future stability (until the FCC gets done with their a la carte rulings). Will AOL die off altogether or will it die off as an ISP? That all depends on the success of the transformation being put together by Jonathan Miller to move the company to ad-driven portals.
(Ok, Julius Caesar said three but there's been inflation since then.)
I've always thought that MS was way too diffuse. Just what is it's business? Just what does it want to do? "A PC on Every Desk Top". Is that still its statement? If so, it's looking more out of date by the second.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
"AOL is the only division I know of that's dead weight"
Make some conservative assumptions:
10,000,000 members paying $20/month
Revenue of $200,000,000/month, over $2billion a year. The cost to AOL of one of these accounts is less than $10/month.
Yeah, $100million free cash flow/month. That's dead weight...sure.
Time Warner *wants* to ditch AOL because of old wounds, but Time Warner can't afford to....it's too much free money currently, which is used to fund their less-spectacular divisions.
Cable or DSL, Cable or DSS
Not everybody has a choice between cable and DSL, especially given that many local telephone monopolies have been dragging their feet. And because cable Internet is traditionally tied to cable television, you can't choose satellite TV if you want high-speed Internet.
Artists dont HAVE to sign with Warner Music
Unless Warner Music is the only label whose A&R department will give them an offer that includes retail distribution in chain stores such as Best Buy and Tower (for people who don't have high-speed Internet access to buy the album as a digital delivery such as through iTMS) and promotion on commercial FM radio (for people who don't have mobile Internet access to listen to Internet radio in a motor vehicle). Then you have a monopsony, which becomes a monopoly on that artist's music on the consumer end.
How do you think he got the handle "Corporate Raider?"
Even if Netscape is its predecessor, Mozilla has stood on its own and has gained worldwide respect without being associated to Netscape. As another reply stated, Netscape has a lot of baggage and people don't react to that old name anymore. Mozilla has existed for a long time, but Mozilla Firefox is a relatively new product, and that helps getting some new users. Mozilla shouldn't change to Netscape because it is not Netscape. It's a whole new thing.
Favorite quote: "
Time Warner have a huge back catalog of music and film sitting there, but they've provided no means for customers of AOL to access any of it.
For one thing, (\\`) Warner Music Group is no longer part of Time Warner. For another, film is way too large to push over an AOL dial-up connection.
Time Warner's broadband properties are not a utility, like water, sewer, electricity, or natural gas-- things you can't live without.
People lived without indoor plumbing and indoor power for nearly six millennia.
They don't have ... the same easement and right-of-way capital assets
Really? You try to start a new cable company in your town and see how far you get.
That's what SONY did, and they are constantly battling each other because their core interests directly conflict.
I suggest you read Slashdot
What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?
Has this Microsoft line become common wisdom now? Assuming that technological innovation is that important, it still does not need huge conglomerates to happen.
It's one of those contradictions of our business system- in a capitalist system resources are allocated through the market which kind of aggregates and handles the whims and desires and needs of the consumers and producers involved effectively, but then you have centrally planning as operated in say the Soviet Union where a rigid hierarchy decides how to move resources around, although there are still external market forces from competing capitalist societies, other central planned but independent countries, and what not. The thing is, companies in capitalist system internally operate with central planning, which is fine on a certain scale but the larger they get the larger the amount of resources in the nominally capitalist system are being allocated in non-capitalist ways, and I think everyone suffers from a less effective market as a result.
Of course, AOL competes against Road Runner. Will Time Warner let AOL logo fall off a cliff?
When the US monopoly decision on Microsoft was official, and the "remedy" phase was at hand, many of us discussed the merits of splitting MS into nonmonopoly units. The MS "vertical" monopoly, its stack of OS/app/dev/content that excluded competitors in fact and overwhelming advantage, was fundamentally anticompetitive. So we talked about the benefits of splitting it into at least those four units, (maybe a fifth for "other", or maybe a sixth for "networks" including Comcast shares and the like). Then requiring they make partnerships on a nonpreferential (to each other) basis. There was consensus that the resulting sum of the divided parts would be worth more in stockmarket capitalization, revenues and penetration of other markets, whicle leaving lots of large niches in which other companies could compete, even a chance for other (or new) companies to seize leadership, or for units to (gasp) go out of business if they couldn't compete on merit.
Instead, the most popular remedy suggested by the most influential spectators, the Wall Street Journal crowd, was "horizontal" split into smaller microcosms: MS1, MS2, MS3 - just cut them down to size, retaining all the same operations, and fight each other. FWIW, does anyone even know what the MS remedy actually was (is), other than oversight by a nanny judge? And how the new regime compares to the old in specific metrics accepted by the judge who determined MS was a monopoly? In any event, MS is still an anticompetitive juggernaut, as subsequent state monopoly lawsuits demonstrate, as well as the news in any given month, and especially to anyone trying to actually compete with MS even in their areas of vapor competence.
This is, of course, exactly the same pattern as the paradigmmatic monopoly breakup: AT&T. The "Baby Bells" were little "Ma Bells", regional monopolies which were smaller, but just as anticompetitive. Until cable companies like Time Warner recently started offering phone service, they continued their local service monopolies. Though long distance immediately became competitive - the AT&T monopoly action was brought by MCI, which found it couldn't compete with a monopoly, regardless of its merit. The MS monopoly decision also was the result of a competitor bringing action: Netscape, which claimed (correctly) that MS violation of a prior court consent decree not to bundle IE with Windows illegally interfered with its ability to compete. Netscape, of course, was bought up by AOL by the time of the monopoly decision, as the anticompetition took its toll, while AOL also bought Time Warner, as people believed (among other fantasies) that the AOL combination could compete with MS better than Time Warner could, especially if it was also Time Warner, and once MS was divested of its monopoly advantage. That turned out to be wrong, in several essential ways.
But recall that the vertical split was believed to offer greater collective return to shareholders. And that it would offer the benefits of competition to consumers, from price to quality, as well as market opportunities for vendors. Icahn apparently believes that is the case. Bill Gates, an even larger holder of MS shares than Icahn is of TW shares, has the benefit of a single manageable empire to compensate for the tradeoff of potentially more $billions in returns on his shares. Is there a good example of a monopoly, especially a tech one, that was split into its vertical components? Bundling is the most powerful competitive tool, short of IP monopoly, in the tech business. It seems clear to many people that vertical splits are the proper remedy to protect the market, and even benefit shareholders at the ego expense of executives. Which ones can we study for actual market results, and compare with these others, which have gone the other way - and usually remain monopolies in different guise?
--
make install -not war
I work in video production for Time Warner Media Sales, which is part of Time Warner Cable... This rumor has been floating around our hallways for years. We all lament the AOL merger, not for their lack of profitability or sheer lameness, but because their corporate culture was sooooo different than ours. For example, AOL doesn't do their own video production, so their IT policies are way out of whack with running a production company... Plus, due to the questionable accounting practices at AOL before the merger, the corporation's main focus seems to be compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That's fine, but let the bean-counters deal with that. I can't speak for the rest of the company, but I think breaking up into those divisions would be good for us. We stayed profitable throughout the last few years, despite any trouble that AOL and the others were going through. Anyway, the traditional end of the year story on the impending breakup of TW is not anything new.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Technical innovation from a company like Time Warner means DRM, shitty media players that force you to watch commercials and pay for bundled crap, and AOL.
I'll take my chances with the innovations offered by smaller companies.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
Not to mention the 11% of Google's business they supply.
If AOL is spun off and killed, its not like its customers would just drop off the Internet. They would find other ISPs, and therefore Google would still presumably get their business. Its just that you'd see a host of smaller contributors to Google's traffic, rather than a large block coming from AOL.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street. So why are so many companies now rushing to get unhitched? Also, is this outbreak of corporate divorces good for shareholders, or should I sell my stocks now?
This is because many large orginisations assumed that the entire purpose and meaning of the information age was to use inventions like the internet to leverage their copyright holdings for unlimited growth and profit. History is repeating itself really ....
Dursing the 1850's there were many industries who assumed that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their slave plantations for unlimited growth and profit. At first, the industrialists were a close and tight nit family with the plantationists, but soon it became apparent that the mobile labor force that was needed by the industrialists was the anti-christ of the plantation system and the forces that drove them appart were greater than the ones that bound them together.
The same is true today, the tech industries benefit from the unrestricted flow of content, wehere the media industries benefit from total controll over it. They are completely incompatable paradigms and the forces that are driving them apart are greater than the ones holding them together. All I can say, is get ready for all freakin hell to break loose.
This is may or may not be good for consumers -- but it will make Mr. Icahn some money. An understanding of who Carl Icahn is, and what he does, may help.
Carl Icahn is an old guy (born to a middle-class Jewish family in Queens, NY). He makes his money by buying controlling interests in firms and reorganizing them in ways that increase the share price. In this regard, he and other corporate raiders have made American capitalism work more the way it is supposed to (according to the law). Sometimes they've broken the law, and screwed over minority investors; clearly that's awful
The methods of someone like Carl Icahn produce anger, hatred and even anti-semitism -- even though what he does is consistent with American law.
The basic idea of "corporate raiding" is to get enough of a controlling interest in a firm that the raider can convince the board to let him break the "unwritten" rules of American capitalism, for the benefit of the shareholders.
For instance, at big firms, younger employees used to get paid less than at other firms, but had job security. When they got old, they still got paid, even though the company would have been better off without them. Also, often the pension funds for the workers contained more money than they were required to have by law. That money could instead go to shareholders.
Doing those things rubs a lot of folks the wrong way, but that's usually because they imagine that a company has a duty to its workers -- which, in America, is not the case. The company is only beholden to its owners. Until the law changes and the owning class is disposessed, that's the law (and please remember to call me when the revolution happens, guys). Carl Icahn's brilliant ideas, among others, were to fire the older workers and give the extra pension fund money to the shareholders. Perhaps a little "creative accounting" allowed him to give more and then some. This was great for shareholders.
The bosses running American companies had always been legally able to act like Carl; they just didn't have the chutzpah to do it. The American system was less meritocratic, chummy and run by whites.
The corporate raiding could have happened in the 60s or 70s, but banks wouldn't loan money to outsiders like Carl Icahn and his fellow corporate raiders. Without the money, they couldn't buy a controlling interest in a firm and reorganize things.
The banks didn't loan to folks like Carl partly out of self-preservation: by loaning money to people like Carl Icahn, they'd be alienating the other bosses of the companies they served, and that could result in them getting cut out of routine transactions that were their bread and butter.
E.g. if a bank helped Icahn to to a takeover, it would lose some business customers, because pissed off company bosses would withold their company's business -- even if the bank had low rates and not using them was bad for the shareholders!
The reluctance of bankers to loan money to corporate raiders changed in the 80s when Michael Milken, working at Drexel, Burnham and Lambert, appeared on the scene. With high yield bonds, he had the money from investors. Michael and his bank (Drexel, Burnham and Lambert) was willing to loan money to corporate raiders, because the Jewish bank (that's not meant to be "antisemitic" --- but just a statement of who owned, ran and staffed the bank) didn't have much corporate business to lose.
As documented in the book "Predator's Ball", by the Jewish journalist Connie Bruck, to a man, almost all of the corporate raiders and bankers who provided the money were Jews with roots in Poland or Russia. A number of things came together: they were intelligent, hard working, insensitive to criticism, full of love for money (I don't want to use the word "greedy" in connection with "Jews", lest I be accused of "antisemitism" by the hypersensitive), able to do business with each other (genetic relatedness helps people to establish trust) and uncaring about the needs/feelings o
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
As far as I can tell, many of the Netscape people are over at Google now anyway. I happened to be there on the day Firefox 1.5 went gold and saw them whooping it up a bit.
I presume Google pays them (and lets them use their free cafeteria, etc.), but I dunno who they really work for (report to).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Problem is that if it gets broken up now, and it is forced to be broken up, it will only try to get back to its original size. It will be good for a few years, and then it will put itself back togeather again. Nice idea though. How does one stop megamonopolies?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I think it will work. I think it's really amazing cool that it will work, also, because it validates some people's foresight of the future: that money will increasingly become obsolete (not all at once).
Once we achieve nanotechnology, we'll be able to create any good from dirt and sunlight. Services are a slightly different story; we'd be able to create robots to perform the services, so no human would need to work.
In a pre-nanotech society (but one rapidly approaching nanotech), it makes sense that as much as possible, goods and services would be available to humans at no cost, and the companies would make their money via advertising. This is, largely, one company giving another company pieces of paper in order for both companies to continue to provide something for free to citizens.
So what I'm getting at is, enjoy the free stuff because there will be even more of it in the future!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
They're just splitting up Time Warner into four new "collectable" pieces[*] to make them more attractive to Google.
* While supplies last. No purchase necessary. See store for official rules.
Try to start any kind of 21st century publishing company and see how far you get. Cable carries everything that paper and radio waves once did and will soon take the place of public libraries. Can we really afford to give the same kind of control to this new media that we gave to Radio and phone companies based on conditions and limits that no longer exist?
The last mile barrier must be broken by re allocating existing bandwith. Using demonstrated technologies, there is no bandwith shortage now or ever again. Many social problems can be solved by eliminating wasteful allocation of useful radio spectrum. Such a move will destroy the companies that were built on creating that last mile in the first place. They are no longer needed because the last mile can be bridged without granting exclusive control over it. The net social gain will be many times larger than the loss of obsolete services.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Omnia AOL in quartuor partes divisa est.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
In a well-wnitten opinion piece in the July/August 2004 Washington Monthly titled "My Beef With Big Media", Ted Turner argues for the break-up of media conglomerates. He makes the case that they not only stifle innovation, they are also frighteningly bad for democracy. To my mind, Turner's argument is the best so far against these conglomerates. He has also been perhaps the most strident critic of CNN's devolution into an infotainment channel over the past few years, and it's worth noting that he may have axes to grind due to his strenuous opposition to the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL, but his arguments are no less valid for all that.
Here, these people can help you.
Not to defend AOL or anything but you are wrong that AOL is the only dead weight in Time-Warner.
I didn't say they AOL was the only dead weight at Time Warner. I said they were the only dead weight I knew of.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
As far as I know, Netscape doesn't exist anymore and has not existed for some years. I think they have been contracting their projects and no longer even have in-house developers. At least I know the Netscape 8.0 web-browser was just a refurbished Firefox outsourced to some Canadian company with the Netscape logo popped on top.
Sad to say it, but I'm pretty sure the death of a great Internet company has already occured..
And the male of the goats, for its part, put on great airs to an extreme; but as soon as it became mighty, the great horn was broken, and there proceeded to come up conspicuously four instead of it, toward the four winds of the heavens. - Daniel 8:8
Breakups and mergers cause movements in stock prices. They also create a whirlwind of new options for newly created (or divided) companies.
Acquisitions are truly about expanding a large company into new areas (or buying out the competition). Mergers and break-ups are all about making the executives richer than they already are.
Who pays ???? All you saps who will go out and buy AOL-Time-Warner stock.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
If there is ANY real business strategy here (beyond just pushing paper and scraping profits while all the books are unsettled), it's to capitalize on AOLs one true asset, ignorance.
There is an entire legions out there who believe AOL IS the internet. They aren't techno savvy but they've learned how to use AOL's bloated interface.
Like Mario or Halo, AOL's true value is as an "exclusive". Exclusive to who you say??? Exclusive to the big media conglomerate that will come along and BUY AOL after they have been spun off. Why not sell directly? Well that would only mean ONE commission for the money brokers.
It could be comcast, it could be verizon. Than again, maybe their best strategy is to license their interface like TIVO has done.
With wireless broadband marching steadily into the consumer space, it's pretty clear that AOL will soon be OUT of the "onramp" business. And AOLs value as a portal really isn't that great (this is a battle between Google, Yahoo and MSN).
The problem with current broadband subscription is that AOL is NOT the default. Some liberated service installer can show users how to reach websites WITHOUT AOL. That's BAD. They can even setup their mail using Outlook Express. That's EVEN WORSE!!!!
What AOL needs is for those installation techs to install AOL AS THE DEFAULT!!! What they need is AOCelL for wireless instant messaging.
The only way to keep people in the cave is to keep their eyes on the wall. When someone gets between AOL and their users, they can show them a whole new world. AOLs job is to figure out how to stop their users from becoming knowlegable!!!!
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So you predict that Sony will sell off it's music and movie studios sometime soon?
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One company will still be called Time Warner, the other three are: Wakko Warner Yakko Warner Dot Warner
What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?
... the de facto state of affairs to protect consumers is *not* to stifle innovation! If you had said "big business" instead of "consumers" that would've made a lot more sense...
Excuse me? That's stated like they are mutually exclusive goals
Technological innovation *is* good for consumers, but bad for big business, who is used to milking a technological development for as long as they can. People don't understand - corporations don't exist to be good to the environment, the consumer, or their employees, they don't even care about the law per se; the sole point of a corporation's existence is to make as much profit as possible, period. The sooner people recognize and understand this, the better off they will be able to deal with the problem.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu