|
related:
Time-Warner
|
This
page looks at America Online (AOL), the ISP that merged
with the Time Warner conglomerate.
It covers -
introduction
The 2000 merger between America Online and Time-Warner
(itself the product of the merger between the Time-Life
publishing group and the Warner music, film, publishing
and theme parks conglomerate) was praised by some analysts
as an ideal marriage of content with carriage.
The new group, based of course in the US and identified
as AOL Time Warner, operated in all continents except
Antarctica and had annual sales of around US$40 billion.
Three years later many of the executives responsible for
the merger had departed, the share price had slumped and
the group had shed 'AOL' from its name amid suggestions
that the AOL operations might be spun off.
Kara Swisher in There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere
(2003) attributed the pain to a clash of corporate cultures
and executive personalities
To
Time Warner, AOL was rude and rambunctious, facile and
ignorant about the complexities of the various businesses
... To AOL, Time Warner was political for the sake of
politics, slow moving and obdurate, and unwilling to
make the changes needed to face down the challenges
of the future.
Time-Life + Warner
We've provided a separate profile
of the Time-Life group, Warner and Turner, with a schematic
of major holdings.
AOL
AOL predates the web as the operator of a private
network, renowned for indifferent service and a proprietorial
attitude to its subscribers.
It belatedly embraced the internet and leveraged its competitive
advantage (in particular 'lock in' of subscribers) in
acquisition of competitors such as Compuserve and large-scale
snail-mail based recruitment campaigns.
Acquisition of Netscape was less successful and it's difficult
to disagree with an executive's comment that "We
all knew we were living on borrowed time and had to buy
something of substance", the substance being Time-Warner.
Expansion into Europe, particularly Germany, has been
more successful than in Australia, where predictions
that it would dominate the local ISP and ICH markets have
not been substantiated.
studies
The standard profile of AOL is the adoring aol.com:
How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and
made millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times
1998) by Kara Swisher. Oooh, those awful netheads!
She was distinctly less enthusiastic in There Must
Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle
and the Quest for the Digital Future (New York: Crown
Business 2003), a work that for us is overly self-reflexive.
It can be supplemented by Alec Klein's Stealing Time:
Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
(New York: Simon & Schuster 2003) and Nina Munk's
Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin & the Unmaking
of AOL Time Warner (New York: HarperBusiness 2004)
which offer an account of high expectations and disappointment
since 1999.
Michael Wolff's entertaining Burn Rate (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1998) and Autumn of the
Moguls (New York: HarperCollins 2003) - the latter,
like There Must Be A Pony, frequently places
the author distractingly centre stage - and two Wired
profiles from 1995
and 1996
are also of value.
Christopher
Byron's The Fanciest Dive: What Happened When The Media
Empire of Time/Life Leaped Without Looking Into The Age
of High Tech (New York: Norton 1986) is overly anecdotal
but suggested, as the suits at AOLTW were going to rediscover
- the hard way - that 'it ain't as easy as it looks'.
Digital Babylon (New York: Arcade 1999) by John Geirland
& Eva Sonesh-Kedar is a similar account of 'Hollywood
meets the internet'.
For
perspectives on the evolving cable television industry
and AOL's relations with groups such as Liberty,
Comcast and Cablevision
we recommend Stephen Keating's Cutthroat:
High Stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier
(Boulder: Johnson 1999) and L J Davis' The Billionaire
Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate
Titans Invented A Future Nobody Wanted (New York:
Doubleday 1998). A profile of Canadian telco, television,
ISP and newspaper group BCE is here.
David Stauffer's Business the AOL Way: Secrets of the
World's #1 Webmaster (Oxford: Capstone 2000), like
others in the 'Secrets' series, is thin.
Chronology
A chronology of AOL and Time-Warner is here.
::
|
|
