AOL's Steve Case Resigns

Fox News

[rs79bm]

I guess it's about time. Afterall, he accomplished everything he set out to do. Turn the company around, balance the books, make sure the company is turning profits quarter after quarter, lift up company morale, be the world's number one service provider, make AOL users enjoy their internet service with faster access and less busy tones. So essentially, just what is their left for him to accomplish???


major sarcasm/

[Timesink]

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Truly, the Internet fraud bubble is dead.

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

Maybe someone can help me, Ive got aol on my hard drive, actually I have versions 45 and 7 on my hard drive. But I cant delete them off my hard drive, they are just sitting there....why? I try to delete it and a error mesage pops up.

Has anyone else ever had this problem? I hate aol

[Lancey Howard]

Explorer is the real nightmare.
What a piece of crap that thing is.

[alphadog]

Gun grabbing Bolshevik...I'm still purging my computer of AOL "hooks"

[SpinyNorman]

I'd have to say then that you needed some direction on how to deal with any company/service. Everything they do regarding billing, charges, free months etc is documented and posted to your billing page and you are notified via email of support conversations and the results of them. You can also choose to chat online instead of by phone, and you'll then have a log of the entire conversation. You can also take names, and ask to speak to supervisors. I have quit AOL many times, and gone back with free hours, etc. I have never paid for any hour I didn't use. As for credit card deductions, one call to the credit card company ends that. Now, I am certainly not saying that AOL is a good company, just that being an informed consumer of any service should be the norm.

Well, I never actually used the interface, mostly because I hated it, but mostly as I only needed the internet access a few times when out of state (My ISP is local). I wish I had known about the chat room, but I assumed that they were a decent company at minimum, and a simple call would end matters amicably. And naturally, if I chose to use their service to end same, I would have been charged for another "free" month!! I was specifically told to call before 12/18 to finalize the cancellation or the service would resume (I called on 12/17 both to cancel and have the charges for the "free" months rescinded). I did that, but they said they only had a record of my initial call, which, oddly enough, noted that I called to cancel the service! Go figure! I did take names, but when they "lose" the records of those interactions, they simply don't care. For a company that uses phones and computers to make their millions, they sure are inept in the use of both.

You are absolutely right: an informed customer of any service should be the norm. Similarly, a good company with reasonable business practices should also be the norm. Than is not the case with AOL, as some of the above posts and the sites I previously listed will attest. All the disputed charges have been reported to the credit card company. In my case, all subsequent relationships with ISPs will be treated with a wary and jaded eye, although my local ISP has been exemplary in its handling of any problems with my account. Now I do the internet and BBB search first.

[SpinyNorman]

Explorer is the real nightmare. What a piece of crap that thing is.

Ain't that the truth!! I am going to try Opera or stick to a few of the browsers supplied with my flavor of Linux.

[Timesink]

Case said in a statement that he was stepping down because "some shareholders continue to focus their disappointment with the company's post-merger performance on me personally."

Gee, Steve, you think maybe that's because it is? You knew the Internet fraud bubble was about to burst, so you took advantage of your company's wildly-inflated market value to eat up a real company with an actual business plan, actual revenues and actual value. Then when the bubble burst, Time Warner was left with this giant AOL albatross on its back, and still is to this day. Which is why the stock is worth less than half what it was a year ago. Meanwhile, you walk away with $700 MILLION in profit from the stock you sold.

Prediction: AOL Time Warner will drop the AOL part of its name within six months. TW has only two choices: Spin off AOL again and let it sink or swim on its own, or keep it and do what they should have done all along: Make all Time Warner properties available only through AOL. You want to read Time or People or Sports Illustrated online? Then you subscribe to AOL, or you don't get any access. The sheeple will scream for about a week, and then start paying up. Maybe.

[Timesink]

The other day I called to cancel, and the rep told me how to get free access my filling out surveys and junk lol (the AOL email acct can get spammed I don't use it lol). You can 'earn' up to about $10 in free time.

You don't happen to remember the keyword for those surveys, do ya?

[Timesink]

Tell her to covet DROOY, GG, HFI, and PAAS instead...

Now now, don't be a tease. Tell us why.

Personally, I'm watching SIRI and XMSR myself. Not without risk, especially in the long term, but I'm betting they manage to pull off a, shall we say, AOL-style PR shell game in the short term to drive up share prices.

[hunter112]

Look for RegClean on Google, it will help you delete all kinds of crap that gets stuck in your registry. Free, simple to use, works great. And if you dump anything by accident, you can always restore it easily.

NEVER put AOHell on your computer, never give them a credit card number. They lock onto both like a never-ending disease. I'd rather remarry my ex-wife!

[Timesink]

Like duh, what was the point of the merger, then?

AOL was actually in a relatively precarious situation, and pretty much had been for most of the 90s. The only reasons - and I mean only reasons - that AOL had any value whatsoever are: 1) For much of the 90s, most people thought AOL = "The Internet" and they were able to ride that PR wave; 2) They were able to keep adding enough subscribers to overcome their astronomic churn rate and thus keep a steady inflow of cash coming in even as people cancelled by the millions. But the market was becoming saturated, and tons of other ISPs were starting to pop up all over the place and take market share away from AOL. Like all the dotcom frauds that were to come along later, AOL never really made much money, because the had to spend most of their revenues to attract new customers to make up for all the other customers that were quitting. (In fairness, though, they did make SOME money I believe; most dotcoms never earned a dime.)

So Case knew that things were getting close to "GAME OVER". He had to do something while AOL still had an astronomical market value, before everyone figured out AOL's business plan was a house of cards. So he took all his stock value and used it to buy a real company: Time Warner. Everything they ever said about "synergy" and all that crap was just so much BS; maybe the Time Warner execs bought into it, but Case knew better. Once he merged AOL with Time Warner, he knew his own wealth was secured, because TW was strong enough to handle the implosion of AOL without collapsing itself. Which is precisely what happened. AOL Time Warner is worth only a fraction of what it was immediately after the merger, but at least it still exists. (AOL alone would probably have gone bankrupt like all the other dotcoms in 2001 or 2002.) And Case sold lots and lots of stock over time, something like $700 million plus, I believe. That was the only point of the merger.

[Timesink]

Hey, everyone, "The Big Heist" is showing on CNBC. The show discusses AOL's takeover of TW. Coinkydink that this is on today?

Yes. It was already scheduled.

[MissAmericanPie]

I'm sure the rich Saudi that owns a majority of stock in AOL/Time/Warner was very unhappy with the bottom line. Reason enough to dump AOL.

[Bush2000]

Great synopsis. Nobody will shed any tears for Case: He took a two-bit ISP and turned it into a one-bit ISP.

[Bush2000]

Prediction: AOL Time Warner will drop the AOL part of its name within six months. TW has only two choices: Spin off AOL again and let it sink or swim on its own, or keep it and do what they should have done all along: Make all Time Warner properties available only through AOL. You want to read Time or People or Sports Illustrated online? Then you subscribe to AOL, or you don't get any access. The sheeple will scream for about a week, and then start paying up. Maybe.

Very few people are going to pay for TW content, in my opinion. Especially since most of the competing content is free.

[Moonman62]

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Truly, the Internet fraud bubble is dead.

Now if we can only do something about the government fraud bubble that's taking it's place. BTW, most of the non-fraud internet companies that have survived have been doing well lately.

[visualops]

There's 2 actually, keyword OP (for opinion poll), and keyword freetimeonline.

[visualops]

Oh I agree...the only reason now that they have resources such as the chat etc, is because of numerous complaints over the years. I'll add it's because of companies like them that I am so careful. The first year I used AOL, which was in '95 I think (and only because I couldn't get the local ISP software installed properly), I ended up having to close a bank account to stop the monthly draw. That was on advice of the bank, who couldn't stop the draw because it was not a set amount. Basically I refused to pay a bill when they informed me and thousands of other customers that there would be an "adjustment" to my bill, but would not say how much or if it was up or down.