My name is Bobby and I create media companies when I'm not ousted

[Joubert[$]]

Poor Bob Pittman is taking the rap for overstating AOL earnings during the TWX takeover. Not really, but the Time Warner guys are using that and the slumping stock price to get rid of a very real threat to their own positions.

All Pittman ever did was help make AOL and MTV what they are today.

Yeah, the stock is in free fall. Yeah, they have a new CFO who can claim "not me" when accounting liberties are brought to life. But does anyone think the NY suits can successfully run AOL? Hell, the Virginia kids were having trouble and they understand the medium!

More layoffs are coming, and I've heard through a friend of a friend that a major site overhaul is frantically being coded.

[brian_igo]

The cultures on this deal were all wrong to begin with. Just getting Time and Warner together was a miracle. (There should be a statue of Steve Ross somewhere on Madison or Park Avenue just for pulling that off.) And lets be honest, the kids from AOL didn't exactly show a lot of grace towards their elders after the merger.

I like the merger today for the same reasons I did when it happened. Without the deal AOL was doomed. They catered to the entry level market when the market was maturing, they had lost many of their once-exclusive features like chat and instant messaging to free competitors, and they were being undercut on price by every mom and pop ISP across the country. Their greatest asset was their brand, but keeping that in the public eye was costing a lot more for lower results.

Anyway, I liked the deal because I thought it positioned AOL incredibly well for the next generation of the internet. Right now we still pay to access the web, but I think the inevitable future of the mass-market internet is content. It might be interactive content or the internet might become the delivery device for content on demand. But someday we will subscribe to internet service for the same reason we fork out for cable or satellite television-for the content we can't get anyplace else.

All AOL has to do until that happens is maintain its market share and its technological abilities. Let each side do its own thing, but when that subscriber content breakthrough really hits-look out. AOL/TimeWarner will become the biggest company in the history of the world.


Brian

(PS--But I think AOL/TW could move things along by bringing in a major computer/video game publisher. They really need a new media company that can show the old media side of TW, and the network provider of AOL, how to develop subscriber content.)