Time Warner names day for AOL spin-off
Time Warner has detailed the departure date for its troubled internet business AOL. On 9 December all Time Warner shareholders will get one AOL share for every 11 TW shares they own. Time Warner shares will continue to trade as normal with the ticker TWZ and AOL shares will trade under the AOL ticker. When the two first merged …
I thought TW had dumped AOL years ago.
It was quite funny though - possibly the most stupid business acquisition in history.
how times change. I always thought is was very odd how a company like AOL could possibly buy a long standing media giant like TW.
Plus AOL always had one of the flakiest old-school business models of what the internet should be, largely going against the basic premise of what the internet is/was. I guess that's what attracted confused investors but also killed the company as everyone else passed them by.
AOL were finished when they decided to dump 8742365975976235976 unwanted AOL CDs onto the unsuspecting public - that couldn't have been cheap. I must have thrown away about 60 of them myself.
@Absent - TW bought AOL, not vice versa.
No, infact AOL bought TW. I am a former employee of AOL, and still have many friends at AOL. AOL bought TW and then the TW suits bullied themselves into power rather quickly and destroyed AOL. AOL had the right idea, and if they were allowed to pull it off, would be a market leader in digital streaming content. They bought TW for the specific purpose of streaming thier catalogue online. AOL had the people and recources to do this easily. the TW suits wouldn't have that, so they basically took over from the inside, and somehow AOL became a property of TW. If you talk to any long time AOL employee, you will get a story of how TW F'd AOL, and for the 4 years I was there, I saw a little of that. Every year or two TW would replace the CEO of AOL, who would then close departments and lay off people, thus reducing costs, and earning a huge performance bonus. There is allot of talent at AOL still. If someone with some stones would take the helm, and development of ideas and creation of properties started taking place again, AOL could be around for a while. I'm not sure what will happen with PlatformA, which is the advertising arm, basically a different company ripped from AOLs recources.
They formed a new company in the merger called AOL Time Warner and gave each others' share holders stock in the new company.
http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,667602,00.html
AOL and Time Warner should have been the perfect marriage. A company with a business model of providing online content (even though they thought they were a connectivity provider,) and a company with a huge collection of content.
What killed the synergy was the clash of cultures.
I remember them veeery well. There's a reason www.aolsucks.org *still* exists. Their "free" trials required you to give 'em your credit card, and cancelling would be extremely difficult. They also charged $40/month for what was basically dialup services, even when real broadband started to charge $40/month as well.
AOL might have had good ideas on other areas, but they were the dumb man's ISP, and not only in the "internet n00bz" sense. They can burn in hell!
