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Time Warner To Spin Off AOL

Posted by samzenpus on from the goodbye dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Time Warner is inching closer to untangling one of the worst mergers in American corporate history that began with the merger of Time Warner with America Online, a deal that has resulted in the evaporation of more than $100 billion of shareholder value. "Although the company's board of directors has not made any decision, the company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner's stockholders, in one or a series of transactions," Time Warner said in the filing. Tech industry analysts have speculated for years that Time Warner would spin off AOL; the two companies merged in 2001 with the idea that AOL's strengths as a new media company could benefit an old media company like Time Warner, and vice versa. But few synergies ever arose from the marriage and even AOL founder Steve Case, who is no longer with the company, has said that he believes the two companies should be separated."

1 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What was AOL for, again? by Ceiynt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I reember when broadband service started to eat away at dial-up. AOL was offering AOL Broadband. It was just the AOL face over your existing, always connected connection. Internet Explorer brought to you by AOL, with AOL as the home page, and the crappy AOL email service. People bought into that for a while, then realized that if they just clicked on the blue E, they had internet, without some sort of AOL overlay.
    A friend of mine still uses AOL dial-up at I think $24.99 a month, when he can use his phone company for broadband for less then $20, because he's used AOL for the last 10 years and that's all he knows. I downloaded firefox last time I was over there and blew his mind by minimizing his AOL window crap and pulling that up. He thought that was neat, but it didn't look like AOL so he had no idea how to navigate to a different web site, using a real web browser.
    AOL, your 15 minutes are over, please turn the lights out when you leave, maybe Time Warner will wither away in the darkness of an antiquated media format.