Time Warner to Spin Off AOL? 164
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 dying (Score:4, Interesting)
AOL? Hahaha you use AOL? damn dude.... I feel sorry for ya.
Re:Aol is dying (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, they are pushing AOL for broadband. But the thing is, why pay an aditional $14.95 [aol.com] when you already have to pay about $30 a month just for the cable modem service.
They were great in the mid to late 90's when the only way to get on-line was through a modem. Hell even i used them up until about 3 years ago when cable became avaliable in my area. But the reality is that the company is on its way out, its just a matter of when.
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Aol is dying (Score:5, Insightful)
In today's market world, when a company (holding) wants to rid itself of its less profitable ventures, it must first isolate it and make it independant from its "parent" inter-financial network. If someone is gaff enough to take the (dangling) bait, great, but if not, it becomes an investment apart, becomes less (investor) interesting, wilts and dies.
We've seen this story countless times over the past few decades, with only the logo that changes.
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
That may be the case in the US, but here in the UK they're very much pushing broadband. Just look at their home page [aol.co.uk]. For what it's worth, the prices quoted are competitive with other broadband services.
Re:Aol is dying (Score:3)
The price difference between $23 and $10 for dialup may not be that big of a deal to some people (they might like the features of AOL, for instance), but paying $60 instead of $45 when you just want a fast connection?
Still, it would be quite ironic if AOL has to move to the UK in order
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
AOL's gravestone: "They made every month September on Usenet."
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
Re:Aol is dying (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
It *did* happen. Most of the newsgroups ended up as smoking wreckage. In a few, many people reported abuse, adds, clueless aolers, and the like, and exist as productive forums to this day.
hawk
Re:Aol is dying (Score:2)
If the new company still... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If the new company still... (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtually all of AOL's assets, except for the wildly popular AIM, are worthless: their flagship subscription dialup service was killed by broadband (and a lot of people get broadband from Time Warner...). Netscape was killed by IE and now, Firefox (which came from Netscape's source...). Nullsoft's WinAmp was killed by iTunes, and meanwhile, AOL partners with Apple on iTunes. AIM is pretty much all that's keeping them going, and even that is being threatened (only on the horizon so far, but coming up fast) by XMPP. AIM (with IM, email, weather, news, games, and downloads) is essentially what AOL once was, but it's just all ad-supported now. When AIM goes down the tubes, replaced by Jabber, text-messaging, and h.264 video calling, America Online will be completely dead.
TW understands this. They want to get rid of the liability that's AOL as soon as possible.
Winamp's dead? (Score:1)
Re:If the new company still... (Score:2, Informative)
as for winamp, netscape, and mozilla, they
AOL don't own Mozilla. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If the new company still... (Score:2)
Lots of people still pay AOL, even if they have broadband. They also think Comcast has a different Internet than AOL or TimeWarner.
WinAmp wasn't killed, especially not by iTunes. The people who like WinAmp tend to despise iTunes as a bloated and annoying piece of crap, and only get for running the uninstall program with.
AIM is threatened by MSN and Yahoo. Nobody really started to use Jabber for some reason, and XMPP doesn't really exist yet. Also, sending messages on your cell phone suck
OT: Jabber (Score:2)
Re:If the new company still... (Score:1, Informative)
Not doing too bad (Score:2)
Overpriced at $9.99 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
About time, too - (Score:4, Insightful)
--
Toby
Re:About time, too - (Score:5, Informative)
(of Winamp, Gnutella, & WASTE fame)
was a bigger travesty.
The man was pure gold and the software he touched became golden too
So what did AOL do? They put him on such a short leash that he quit.
Re:About time, too - (Score:3, Informative)
Re:About time, too - (Score:2)
Re:About time, too - (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Dunno about that... (Score:2)
Re:About time, too - (Score:2)
Perhaps I believed the wrong reason. The effec on quality was my one real observable. (I'm quite ready to believe that ANY news media article is so slanted it's just wrong.)
What I noticed for certain (based, I admit, on only a few measured data points) was that HP has become progressively less desireable
"No one seems to care..." (Score:2)
"No one seems to care about the life savings of folks in the American middle class. Certainly, the cowboy running this country does not care."
More about U.S. government corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government [futurepower.org].
The U.S. government is being sold to the highest bidder.
Market actually working? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that or the combined company was horribly mismanaged.
Re:Market actually working? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, both. Altough it could have been a marriage made in heaven!
At this moment in time, big media and the internet do not mix easily for obvious reasons. When AOL made the merger with Time-Warner, AOL was hoping for a huge big load of content and Time-Warner was hoping for the mother of distribution channels. But as we all know, up till now there has not been a defini
Re:Market actually working? (Score:2)
As it happened the merger was a disaster. But that wasn't because the idea of merging with an Internet company was bad. It was because the Internet company Time Warner chose to merge with was an overvalued and mismanaged
Alright... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Alright... (Score:4, Informative)
Do your researching before spouting lies and half-truths.
Re:Alright... (Score:3, Insightful)
Check note 7.
In summary: Last quarter, AOL made 324 million dollars in operating income last quarter. That's only 18% of TW's 1,779 million operating income.
Re:Alright... (Score:3, Funny)
I love it when you use analogies that we can understand.
Please. (Score:2, Funny)
[...] even as Firefox continues to batter MSIE market share.
Not even breaking 10% doesn't exactly inspire images of battery. But, hey, whatever gets you those mod points...
asdf (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
*confuzzled* (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:*confuzzled* (Score:2)
Re:*confuzzled* (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:*confuzzled* (Score:1)
KFG
What's next? (Score:4, Funny)
It was just a .com trying to legitimize.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It was just a .com trying to legitimize.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Time Warner was getting sick of AOL (Score:5, Funny)
Technically.... (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:Technically.... (Score:1, Interesting)
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 att
TW in control? Shame on them. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 expectation
Re:TW in control? Shame on them. (Score:2)
Damned root kits
hawk
This is like chicken livers... (Score:5, Funny)
You just know it's all coming back up.
Say it ain't true (Score:3, Insightful)
Gees, I must be some kind of genius because I've been saying that for years.
Re:Say it ain't true (Score:1)
Kierthos
Re:Say it ain't true (Score:1)
Best thing that happened to my neighborhood. There are T-Mobile hotspots in all the Kinko's. And now they're in all the FedExes. But Caribou Coffee is hooked up with SBC. But with the T-Mobile in the FedExes my computer can smell the wireless signal from the FedEx across the street when I'm at Caribou.
Except at 4:30, when the mail truck parks between the two, and I lose all signal for 12 minutes.
I'm starting to think my life is
Re:Say it ain't true (Score:2)
Re:Say it ain't true (Score:2)
"Target thrives; Wal-Mart wobbles" [chicagotribune.com]
"Wal-Mart Quits Online DVD Biz" [newsfactor.com]
So I reiterate: gees, maybe mindless growth... yadda yadda....
Perhaps instead of spending time online slinging around insults, you should try reading the
Re:Say it ain't true (Score:2)
Yeah, but what I meant was that companies run out of ideas about what they can do and turn to mergers just to get bigger and more powerful. That's mindless growth and I maintain that it's destructive to the companies involved and potentially harmful to consumers and our economy in the long-run.
I assure you, you're not a genius.
I never doubted it. ;^)
Conglomerations and Backfiring (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Conglomerations and Backfiring (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of these huge mergers fails to deliver. However, many decsion makers profited personally from it.
Re:Conglomerations and Backfiring (Score:2, Insightful)
If anyone had bothered to ask any techie about AOL at it's most invincible peak, there would be only one possible answer forthcoming: "It's crap, and it's irrelevant, and there's nothing actually there".
The fact that business people use some wierd form of non-Euclidean accounting that values form and hype over substance has always seemed wierd to me. They saw size and broad presence in AOL, and thought that they represented large asset value. No, they merely represe
Their ages?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Their ages?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Their ages?? (Score:2)
Re:Their ages?? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd have to say -57 years is a rather unusual age for an executive. Or for anyone else for that matter.
Re:Their ages?? (Score:2)
TW to spin off AOL, huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:TW to spin off AOL, huh? (Score:2)
Re:TW to spin off AOL, huh? (Score:2)
The first glider I flew was a Puchatek, which is something of a trainer with very large hi-lift hi-drag wings, and a very big dihedreal. It's very hard to spin it, and has a habit of recovering itself. The higher p
Oh well. (Score:2)
Still quite confusing, though. The two companies were never meant to become one. Their business models are too different.
Profit? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Profit? (Score:2)
About damn time (Score:2)
I look forward to the day when my RoadRunner no longer goes thru 3-5 extra hops in the ATDN.net network to get anywhere.
Pre-merger; 10-14 hops to anywhere in the world.
Currently; 15-18 hops, even inside the US.
And on a more personal note, I'm about to start working for TW, so it'll be nice not to have the AOL baggage.
Re:About damn time (Score:1)
Hey here's an idea (Score:4, Funny)
And It's About Time... (Score:1)
Never liked them (Score:1)
What will happen to Mozilla.org? (Score:2)
The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?" Then they supported and continued Netscape's early experiment with open-sourcing the browser and we now have the very successful Mozilla and Firefox browsers, esp. Firefox, that may be eating away at MS's
Re:What will happen to Mozilla.org? (Score:1)
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/ [mozilla.org]
Re:What will happen to Mozilla.org? (Score:2)
Do you think AOL will continue to be part of the default Windows install if they go all-Firefox? They'd have little to gain and almost everything to lose if they drop MS like that.
If anything, incorporating the whole MSIE engine in Netscape 8.0 may be a sign that Netscape itself (if not Firefox-branded) will be a part of the default AOL insta
Re:What will happen to Mozilla.org? (Score:1, Informative)
Then you go on to praise Firefox, which uses said "bloated pile of buggy crap". Make your mind up. As for the libraries, AOL used Gecko for CompuServe 7 and AOL for Mac OS X. It was mainly for political reasons that they didn't use it for the main AOL client for Windows. Netscape
This could be good for AOL (Score:2)
I look forward to seeing what shifts in company direction come out of this. Right now they are just playing catchup in all areas with the real innovators in the industry.
A moronic business move. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:A moronic business move. (Score:2)
Re:A moronic business move. (Score:2)
A burden with over twenty million customers. Not a bad way to start a new service.
Re:A moronic business move. (Score:2)
[*nods*]
Yep, AOL had the "give away junk disks by mail" market *cornered*.
hawk, who found it hysterical when his XP installation disk resurfaced, after his wife mistook it for a coaster
A couple of other articles on the subject (Score:1)
*This* article says otherwise... (Score:1)
BetaNews ran a story about this, which says that Time Warner had considered spinning off AOL but decided that "it would be unnecessary to do so at this time."
Story at: http://www.betanews.com/ar [betanews.com]
Good riddance -- to Time Warner, that is. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
AOL lost its soul. (!?!?!!?) (Score:2)
I agree it would be nice to see AOL take a chunk or two out of MS's hide, but I doubt that will happen. AOL is a middleman, and if there's one thing that technology's drive to efficiency hates is middlemen.
There is content, there are content users. Anything that gets between those two will eventually be pushed aside.
RS
Re:AOL lost its soul. (!?!?!!?) (Score:2)
Look under the fingerail of Satan's right-hand ring finger.
Nearby, on the thumb, you will find Microsoft's soul.
hawk
Synergy! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Synergy! (Score:1)
Re:Synergy! (Score:2)
Yeah!! (Score:2)
Latest News. (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
A collective sigh of relief (Score:2, Funny)
I was just waiting for the Superhero Themed AOL "Browser".
Always did give me a shiver.
AOL owns Batman?, Superman, Bugs, Daffy, and no not FogHorn Leghorn? NooooOOooooooOooo
Re:Price Competition (Score:4, Informative)