AOL looking for love at Yahoo or Microsoft
David Johnson July 16th, 2008
Reuters has anonymous sources that say things are heating up at Time Warner about dealing AOL as their August 1 shareholders meeting approaches. The gossip splits on either an outright sale to Microsoft or Yahoo showing shareholders how they can grow on their own without Microsoft by merging in some way with AOL.
Funny, once upon a time in bubbleland, there was this giant called AOL that had huge audience and all these community features. Microsoft launched MSN to battle, and the little old handmade directory called Yahoo grew into a mega aggregator and rounded out the big three online. Then this site called Google fragmented the branded portals with super search that made millions of teeny tiny sites easier to find. Once they were easy to find, Google built a new business selling cheap tiny turnkey ads on them. Now the big three are all trying to get together somehow.
Funny strange, not funny “ha, ha.”
3 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | July 16th, 2008 at 9:04 am
AOL was never cool. Usenet people hated them, they were the the first spam portal of note, they sent nice drink coasters every week with two-word eassword that surely inspired Jabberwocky…
Then they became insane and bought then ruined Netscape, turned it into the scourage known as Mozilla which in turned spawned all these semi-annoying and worthless (to most users) cloned browsers everyone.
30 years ago I had no MUI, GUI, CHUI or KERBLUI but I’ve had time on minis, micros, networks…
My wishful theme song has become “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
AOL was the worst thing TW ever hooked up with and rather than dump it as they should they are trying to liquidiate it or sell a white elephant.
This is akin to buying a radio station to write it off for taxes and closing it.
2. Er... | July 16th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Not trying to be a pain, but Google is simply Altavista without being subjected to the bubble bursting, inattentive owners and with the luxury of riding the internet wave.
And, Overture invented search ads; Google might get some credit for distributing these ads in a standalone box (Overture was dependent on people implementing a licensed search), but the concept wasn’t Google’s and because Overture had become a trading stock, once again, Google was handed an advantage.
3. Anonymous | July 21st, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Icahn has his board members. Now you can throw a bucket of water on him so he can melt in peace.
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