Case to Step Down from AOLTW

A user writes "Reuters is reporting that Steve Case, the CEO of AOL Time Warner, is resigning, to be effective in May. He'll still be part of AOLTW but as a director responsible for joint strategy. There have been various moves afoot to oust the man who masterminded AOL's takeover of the media giant: the Time Warner part of the partnership wants control whereas Case came from the loss making super-ISP. Case quitting could be bad news for technologists given the current battles between content providers like Time Warner and the Internet and computer industries."

CNBC's "The Big Heist"

[afabbro]

CNBC ran a show last night called "The Big Heist: How AOL Took Time Warner". Good one-hour program that went over the history of the deal and personalities involved, with interviews with leading industry figures. It's their first original content production so I'm sure it'll be on again.

Steve's a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should get off Steve's case (no pun intended). He (with the help of many coworkers) made going online a lot easier for MILLIONS of people. When's the last time you helped MILLIONS of people? Anyway, I'm sorry to see him go. I would have loved to watch Gates and him slug it out for years to come. That would have been real entertainment.

Lesser of two evils

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL wasn't good per se for the diversity of the internet and technical advancements, but giving the reins of the world's largest ISP to TimeWarner, a media company that has ties to organisations such as the RIAA has to be a step backwards.

Imagine the RIAA and TimeWarner controlling AOL (to some extent, at least), thus controlling the internet experience and online-purchasing abilities of a significant fraction of internet surfers.

Granted 'we' dislike AOLers ... "My computer says I have mail, but the mailman hasn't come yet!" ... but when they represent a large proportion of surfers, they are the ones that large corporations will want to target, and this move seems to increase their chances of doing so.

So, what's the solution?

VOTE RMS for AOL/TimeWarner CEO!!!

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of animosity here. We seem to hate Case and AOL even more than we hate Bill and M$. Wow, that seems hard to believe! Do we care that the popularization of the Internet, in part due to AOL's training wheels, has helped make companies like Redhat and Mandrake successful? Or maybe we hate them too?

fuck that I invested in VA

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw that shit, I lost $1000 in VA Linux Systems. Another problem with them is they should have remained VA Research. The name sounds better :)

If Warner has its way

[yerricde]

This will be bad for consumers. Currently, AOL has control over TW. But if the TW side grows more powerful, and Warner gains control over the Internet access of 30 Million Worldwide Members(tm), then Warner can use them as pawns in the battle for DMCA II [digitalconsumer.org] and Bono Act II [baen.com] in the USA and EU legislatures.

Well, it started out as AOL taking over TW...

[Dan93]

...but things turned out just a bit differently. As a former AOL employee, I can tell you that while it started out with AOL taking over Time Warner,it's slowly started to turn around. How many former Time Warner executives now work for AOL? Quite few, yet for some reason, very, very few of the former AOL execs, now work for TW.

Long Overdue!

[Anonymous Coward]

As an ex-AOL employee who lost a lot of money
on AOL stock (my fault, I didn't sell early enough),
I am glad to see this announcement.

Steve, if Barry Schuler is still there, tell him to
take a hike. His arrogance and incompetence
played a major part in the current woes of AOL.

What will be the effects of this?

[sean23007]

Everyone seems to be acting as if this is important. I, however, cannot seem to fathom why it matters who is at the helm of one of the world's worst ISPs. Will AOL abandon all the crap that made them so successful? Will Time Warner renounce the RIAA and MPAA and say it's all about the consumer? Will anything really change?

On a simpler note, maybe someone can answer this question: is this good or bad for the geek community here at Slashdot?

Not necessarily good.

[Selanit]

AOL has its serious downsides, I'll admit it. But they have also done some really good stuff. The prime example of this is Mozilla. Yes, the open-source web browser that is so justly celebrated on this site is backed by AOL. An awful lot of the main developers are AOL employees, and that fast connection that mozilla.org sits on is provided by AOL.

That makes up for one heck of a lot in the way of crappy customer service, if you ask me. Mozilla is as good as it is largely because there is an actual paid development team that works on it professionally. So don't be too quick to shout "Hurrah!" if AOL melts down.

Re:AOL-TW

[fermion]

I am sick of these bogus excuses. We saw the fall in advertising revenue as early as 2000. As late as 2001 internet companies were still structuring deals where the only payment was shared advertising revenue. The vendor would pay the up front development costs and large commission payments to salespeople based only on anticipated furture revenue. The client was responsible for nothing. Increasingly those payment never came. In these cases, one cannot cite advertising, but negligence.

Blaming advertising for AOL is like blaming stock prices for Enron. The fall of Enron stock indirectly caused the bankruptcy. The actual cause was systematic malfeasance within the firm. I don't know that there was malfeasance in the AOL/TW deal, but I do know a lot of deals were made to benefit specific executives and not the companies they serve.

Dispute

[DesScorp]

I have to dispute the thread about the causes for AOL's impending demise. The assumption seems to be that AOL is dying because it's users are getting more net-savy, and moving to "real" ISPs. I don't think so. AOL's doom can be explained in one word.

Broadband.

AOL is a dial-up beast. From beginning to end, it was designed as a one-stop-shopping place to get internet access, web surfing, email, and chat services. The user didn't have to configure much of anything. Just run the setup, and you're on. Everything in one, neat, tidy, and USEFULL package. To so many people, it WAS the internet.

While some users wised up and moved on, most AOLers were quite happy to stay put. Then broadband came along. And those same users discoverd that for just a few dollars more than their AOL bill, they could get blazingly fast internet access. Access from a familiar and trusted source (their phone company or cable tv provider). Yes, other means of access were availabe in the dial-up sphere, but users were happy with what they had.

Cable and Phone companies beat AOL to the broadband game, and the jig was up. Even to the AOL faithful, it was apparent that they were no longer the primary means of access to the web. And a giant mental perception in this country came crumbling down. The internet now means Charter, or Verizon, or Bellsouth, or Knology. It doesn't mean AOL in the age of broadband. The perception has now changed. That perception was AOL's most powerful marketing tool. Broadband, since it's on all the time, is pretty much as easy to use as AOL. You don't have to turn it on. Just click an icon for what you need, and bam!, you're there. It's better than the old days for most users, actually.

Yes, those users were told they could still get AOL for an EXTRA ten bucks or so, but by then, why bother? That mental block has been destroyed. AOL is no longer synonymous with access. It was the gateway in. No longer.

"once-in-a-lifetime bubble that came to an end."

[Futurepower(R)]

The show on CNBC, "The Big Heist: AOL Took Time Warner" was excellent. Best quote: "AOL was a beneficiary of a once-in-a-lifetime bubble that soon came to an end".

I was surprised at how many top executives were interviewed for the show. Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Michael Eisner of Disney are just two.

The show came to no conclusions, however.

What could have stopped Time Warner from making such a self-destructive merger? Ethics. If the TW executives cared about people and what AOL was doing to its customers, if they had cared about other people and not just money, they would have been protected from making the mistake.