I’m tired of the prideful, ignorant, and painfully slow death over at AOL. How can you have the largest ISP/content site in the world, at a time when the entire sector is boooming, and manage to fuck it up so masterfully? The stink is starting to rise not from AOL, but from the folks really calling the shots, the top brass at Time Warner. And that means something must give, and soon. Time Warner is starting to realize, they can’t do any better with AOL than Case and Pittman could back in 2001.
It seems to me like the Time Warner execs, who clearly are still pissed that AOL bought them in the first place, are either killing it through supremely benign neglect, or are trapped in a morass of their own pride. Let me state what seems obvious: the right thing to do is call a spade a spade, and spin AOL out. The folks running Time Warner have other things to do, and they clearly are the wrong people to be driving strategy at AOL. The folks who report to them and run AOL on a day to day basis need independence – otherwise they simply will not be able to compete with Yahoo and Google. Note to the TW Board: swallow your pride and cut AOL loose. Just do it.
Looks like the rumors of Time Warner spinning off AOL are heating up: TW Mulls Sale of AOL.