That AOL thing was a late move right before the bubble popped. AOL had a business model that brought users in to the internet and wouldn’t let them out when they figured out that they didn’t need it. Someday Facebook will go the same way and hopefully before Zuckerberg divests himself.
The AOL merger made no sense at all. AOL was dial-up. Time Warner already had its own cable that provided high speed internet. If buying AOL brought their customers over to their cable system then it might have made sense. I don’t think that was the purpose of the merger. It’s never been clear to me what the purpose was.
“AOL had a business model that brought users in to the internet and wouldn’t let them out when they figured out that they didn’t need it.”
i laughed at AOL’s last desperate move before their complete failure, which was: “We now have high speed internet” ... which of course was marked up at a higher price than if one simply dumped AOL and paid for high speed internet directly from an ISP ... even at that embryonic stage of the Internet, AOL was a tiny pond compared to the world oceans of the Internet ...
the “merger” itself was total insanity because it was completely obvious that AOL was a dead man walking for anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the modern gold rush of the big communication corporations that were busily wiring up the world with high speed internet
once again, such insanity proved that most corporate leaders are completely ignorant morons living exclusively in a bubble of their own hollow ego ...