This one?
Posted on 07/24/2006 7:35:49 PM PDT by LdSentinal
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Steve Case, co-founder of the one-time biggest online service AOL, apologized for the company's merger with media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. in an interview with U.S. journalist Charlie Rose.
In an interview broadcast on Friday, Case, who was shoved aside as chairman in 2003 and who left the board entirely in 2005, said, "Yes, I'm sorry I did it," referring to the 2001 merger of Time Warner and AOL.
The deal, known as one of the worst corporate mergers in history, destroyed some $200 billion in shareholder value.
Last October, Case argued in a Washington Post article that AOL should be split from Time Warner, echoing sentiments shared by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who earlier this year sought to break up the world's largest media company to boost shareholder value.
Although Case called the deal's aftermath a "disappointment," he said he still believed it was "a good idea," according to the interview with Rose.
"I'm disappointed and frustrated that it hasn't developed in the way that we all hoped at the time it could," Case told Rose.
Time Warner is expected to discuss a new strategy for AOL on August 2, after it reports its second-quarter financial statement. Sources have said the company is exploring a plan to give away AOL services for free to users who already have an Internet connection. It does not plan to give away dial-up Internet service
Hey Steve, you've got mail and popups and disconnects and a bombardment of solicitations to buy something.
I doubt you're suffering.
Spare me.
He was sorry all the way to the bank.
Isn't he running for Senate as a Democrat in Hawaii?
That's another Case, this guy's cousin.
I'm a happy AOL customer. 7+ years and I've never had all the problems everybody gripes about. I use it primarily for mail and an internet connection. I don't use or need their environment or most other services. I travel a lot and know that I can always use dialup when at a crummy remote hotel without high speed. I also have a non-aol high speed cable isp that I tag onto with aol. AOL IMHO has the best mail system anywhere.
I'm glad you like AOL and as a consumer you certainly have that right. But the moment AOL came out my BS meter went into overdrive. I just think it's an anachronism now, it served it's purpose when the Internet was in it's infancy (Even then, I still went with a local dial-up ISP instead of AOL).
I actually liked AOL when my kids were young. It had all sorts of ways to keep tabs on what they were doing online--I could even read their IMs without them knowing it, burgle their email, allow them access to certain games and not others, virus-proof them no matter how they insisted on clicking on dumb things they got in the mail or in IMs, and generally safeguard them. I had gone through a number of different virus- and child-protection software without finding a combination of packages that worked as well as what AOL offered our family. But when the rocky early teen years were past and broadband came to our neighborhood I dumped AOL and its high prices.
I had no trouble getting out of AOL and never had difficulties with mail or connections. Customer service was always helpful and agreeable, though sometimes I did have to explain things to the service reps twice before we got technical issues straightened out. I was a happy customer, if you except the liberal line on their news service.
If this involves installing any AOL software on your computer or giving AOL your credit card number, run the other way as fast as you can!
I cannot imagine any free service from AOL that I would want.
Ya blew it Steve. Thanks for finally coming clean about it.
My kids still use AOL Instant Messenger, although they are starting to phase it out, and I hope to drop it sometime soon.
It's lousy software. It works. But it's big and clunky, it installs all sorts of cr*p on your computer without giving you any options, and it has a habit of screwing up your internet connections. Their software developers are idiots. But I would tend to blame Steve Case for the whole problem. He was always more interested in selling ads and providing a foolproof service for computer illiterates than he was in making good software.
I spent a couple of years beta-testing their stuff, back when I was a sysop for CompuServe, and while I signed the usual confidentiality agreement, I don't think I'm breaking it if I say that the whole business was laughable.
This one?
(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)
you stole my line.
- Case early-on saw the profit potential in cyber porn and that was a big piece of his early "business plan" for AOL
- Case once remarked that the Internet is an electronic mall and he intended to own it
Steve Case deserves what Ken Lay got.
When I got Road Runner, they asked me if I wanted a Road Runner email address. I said no. They told me they'd install AOL for free. I told them just give me the friggin connection, I know what to do when I get online. I told them more politely, of course. But really, just hook me up to the net and spare me all the junk. I've got my own web sites, email addresses, and everything else. Just don't install spyware or adware on my computer, and I'm a happy camper.
"I'm a happy AOL customer. 7+ years and I've never had all the problems everybody gripes about. I use it primarily for mail and an internet connection. I don't use or need their environment or most other services. I travel a lot and know that I can always use dialup when at a crummy remote hotel without high speed. I also have a non-aol high speed cable isp that I tag onto with aol. AOL IMHO has the best mail system anywhere."
Glad to hear your experience is positive - but I think the issue with AOL isn't using them so much as it is leaving them - they too kept debiting (or trying to ) a checking account 7 months after I canceled the service, and the only fix was to close the account.
But beyond that, AOL has had it's day. Back when I first tried it, when there was NO internet connectivity, and it was a closed system, it was great - it was a simpler system to use than Compuserve (cheaper, too), and in the early days of the Internet, if you were'nt on Usenet or private boards...there was'nt much to do! AOL provided things to do - I discovered Kai Krause and his Photoshop forums, which were the beginnings of my Photoshop journey, I cut my political teeth with the liberals in the politics chat rooms, heck, i remember when people had never seen porn or spam online.
Then, they tried to morph into a news/media portal, and I think they were too early in that game.
Now? There's no point to them, which is why I can see them giving away the portal free, and get their money from ad revenue, because once you pass their front door, your eyeballs belong to THEM. It might even be safer to use now, I'm sure most of the spammers and porno guys have moved on to better pastures.
IF they can make the interface web-based, I could see using them, but I refuse to install their clunky and bug-ridden crapware on any computer I have, including the Macs. AOL software throws crap everywhere, and writes files everywhere, and is almost impossbile to track down.
I also refuse to let them near any credit card, atm, checking account or PayPal info of mine. Been there, done that. If it's one of those "It's free, but we need yoru CC #" deals, forget it.
In this day and age, access is easy, cheap, and fast, and even the most basic ISP accounts give you everything you need - e-mail, FTP, web hosting, remote access. Aol is now competing in a field of incredibly shrinkiing margins, and their reputation precedes them.
I truly think, that to survive, they need to change the name, and merge with a MySpace type technology. A MySpace/Media Outlet/YouTube juggernaut would be hard to fight with the young crowd, and the older folks have sites like FreeRepublic and the Blogshpere. How can AOL compete with instant, free info and news from independant sources, free networking nets, and free on demand video?
I don't think Free AOL will solve their problems. I think the brand is sullied, the technology ancient, the business model irrelevant, and the market scattered across MySpace, YouTube, Google, and blogs.
Yup. No one will admit it publicly, but the merger was a pretty sweet deal for AOL -- they lost most of the grossly inflated value of their stock, but if they hadn't used all that pretend bubble money to buy something more durable, they would have reached penny-stock status in about 2001.
Time Warner shareholders, on the other hand, got screwed. Gerald Levin bought a bill of goods at a time when all the media CEOs were desperate for an "internet strategy" without much of a clue what that meant.
(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)
AOL made out great in the merger. Their assets were way over-valued at the time of the deal, and almost right afterwards the market sobered up and priced tech junk accordingly.
The TW shareholders are the ones that should be furious.
Yep. Maybe I have a jaundiced view of AOL -- I had done email on VAX/VMS and Unix (uucp) systems in the 80's at work; added CompuServe dial-up for personal stuff around 1990 or so (and my Mom who was in her 70's got on CS and loved it because her son-who-never-writes-letters wrote lots of email to her); stayed with that until I got a real dial-up ISP with web-hosting services around '96, used early Netscape mail; switched to RoadRunner in '99, keeping my local ISP for website hosting.
Never saw any use for AOL.
Every friend I had who got a computer and put AOL on it had trouble, and called me for help. "You know computers, help me!" We're talking maybe 20 different people, every single one complaining about how awful AOL was, but at the same time spouting the party line: "it's easy" and "that's where everybody is".
Ummm, nope, their software was riddled with crap, adware, and spyware. It screwed up your operating system, then it broke down. And only newbies were there.
Never touched the stuff, myself. Well, almost never -- I made a hanging mobile out of AOL install CDs one time.
That cut a big chunk out of the hide of two of the very worst -- Hollywierd moguls and media moguls.
Ever since, Steve Case has been my hero (of sorts).
I got on AOL fairly early on my Mac SE... Circa 1990... when the alternatives were pretty much just local BBS services and Compuserve (which I'd been on for some time). There were somewhere less than 50,000 users in those days, and AOL offered a new and really interesting product. When they added the news wire feeds it really started to blossom.
AOL wiped the floor with longstanding Compuserve and upstarts like Prodigy. The whole chat-room concept was essentially born there (no, not truly, but it was the best of the truly national BBSs for such things, and it took off).
But the birth of the WWW on the Internet was a competitive hurdle that AOL just couldn't overcome. They'd been replaced and it took them a long time to figure that out. I hung on to my AOL account until the late nineties just for sentimental reasons, but finally just let it go. But like it or not, Steve Case was a major player in the evolution of the Internet, chat, news, and all the various services that we now use daily without thinking about how it all started.
Yes, Steven Case is very sorry now that he owns half of Hawaii.
I think the executives at TW are most at fault in this matter.
The deal, known as one of the worst corporate mergers in history... After Cendant.
The Mac equivalent is Adium, which handles those services plus MSN and Yahoo Messenger. It's customizable to the Nth degree if that's what you're into.
Actually, it worked out reasonably well -- CNN, HBO and the other Time Warner companies have a much better online presence and work much better together than they did six years ago. However, AOL didn't bring much to the table in exchange for what they got; TW could have built its own in-house capabilities or struck deals with Google and Yahoo for a lot less money.
It'll be a long time before we see another shot gun wedding of an Internet and traditional sector company again.
If only because most of 'em are already hitched, or at least shacked up.
Mac Plus and 1991 for me, but otherwise ditto.
But the birth of the WWW on the Internet was a competitive hurdle that AOL just couldn't overcome. They'd been replaced and it took them a long time to figure that out.
Yup. AOL wasted most of what it got by buying a media company, and clung to being an access provider long after cable and DSL had beaten them up and taken their lunch money.
What they should have done is leverage all the Time Warner stuff to reposition themselves as a content company. Spend $5/month for AOL, and get the e-mail filters, parental controls, exclusive access to CNN video, HBO and Warner Brothers clips and outtakes, Time, Inc. magazine articles, Warner Records music, etc. That's the kind of thing they're looking at now, but it's way too little too late.
I have an ad suppressor, Dead AIM. It's an old, free version, but it still seems to work.
Your kids can use www.meebo.com or trillian (ceruleanstudios.com) or gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/win32/index.php) They don't install any extra other idiotic adware.
Yep. I think you're right.
I totally disagree. It was AOL that bought Time Warner on, what turned out to be, phony numbers. True, TW tried to put the best face on it, speaking about the combined power of media vs internet, but behind closed doors, the TW leadership hated how this went down and spent the next 4-5 years essentially scrubbing themselves from AOL leadership (and Ted Turner's leadership). TW shareholders (they have an agressive employee stock ownership plan) took a bath in the whole deal as AOL became the source for bad news after bad news after bad news that plummeted the stock from $70 a share to under $10 a share at one point (It's now around $16). While some areas of TW other than AOL have suffered hard times (CNN, publishing), they are also making great money on HBO, films, and cable. They *ought* to be performing much better than they have but the albatross that is AOL continues to drag them down.
LOL! Those CD's constantly arriving in the mail drove me crazy. The company would probably be worth a lot more if they hadn't sent out so much junk mail.
> And all we hear about is Enron.
I find that $200B figure suspiciously high. I'd believe $20B. But that's just my gut reaction....
I dunno; those CDs were one of the most successful shot-gun strategies of the age. People hated to throw away something they associated with "value", and were inclined to "give it a try" before throwing it away. And of course, once they did, it infected their system... and the AOL operators were instructed to not let them terminate their new "accounts".
Oh, it was a VERY successful scam...
Newest question on the SAT's.
T-Ball is to baseball as AOL is to ________?
Oh I betcha he's reaaaaaaal sorry. LOL.
I liked it better when they sent floppies, a little tape over the write protect and a format a: and you never had to buy floppies again. I will say the CDs tend to come in nifty boxes that are well worth keeping.
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