Open Letter To AOL: Put The Lime In The Coconut
Dear Steve Case and Richard Parsons (chairman and CEO, respectively, of AOL Time Warner, with a nod to Ted Turner, who turned WTBS into CNN and proved the critics wrong early on):
We found Time Warner's cure for its AOL indigestion, courtesy of a song echoing down from the 1970s...and the cure applies across the board to plain old practical business in the digital age:
"And say, 'Doctor, ain't there nothing I can take
I say, Doctor, to relieve this belly ache
I say, Doctor, doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take
I say, Doctor, dooooctor, to relieve this belly ache?
Put the lime in the coconut, drink them both together
Put the lime in the coconut, then you feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink them both up
Put the lime in the coconut, & call me in the morning"
Or, put another way, the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan once said (under the influence of lime or coconuts we're not sure).
For example, in the early days of phenomenal growth of AOL it was about chatting. Romance. Hot tub chat. Whatever. Chat drove AOL to millions of users.
You cannot chat through Money magazine. Paper won't hold the conversation in real time.
Or you cannot instant message through HBO. It's a movie channel.
So what's gone wrong at AOL Time Warner?
Ever put a filet mignon in your blender and try and drink a beef smoothie?
Exactly. You get neither a good steak nor a good smoothie.
Time Warner treating AOL as a broadcast medium basically wipes out the value of AOL.
Turned it into a publish and subscribe medium. The old-fashioned edited centralized media experience. AOL Time Warner has fallen into the comfortable pattern of a chronic mediaholic.
Shove more content their way. The buffet. All you can eat.
Flashback, AOL was a distant third in the online wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Driven by early adopters desire to have email (CompuServe's was a series of numbers followed such as 872394872394748@compuserve.com) both Prodigy and CompuServe outpaced the early AOL,a timeshare and bulletin board service for geeks.
The turning point for AOL came in 1993 and 1994 when it discovered a graphical user interface inspired by the Apple Mac. In fact, the first AOL with pictures was available on Macs way before Windows.
The graphical user interface move came in tandem with the sudden rise of chat (or lonely hearts creating online personas to fulfill their virtual desires).
AOL subscriptions soared.
And slowly but surely AOL became a broadcast medium. Information pusher. Pimp for repurposed content. Even its acquisition of instant message pioneer ICQ was downplayed and squandered.
AOL is a lesson in removing the interaction from interactive media.
In stark contrast, eBay is driven entirely by interaction. If nobody puts up an item for sale nobody bids.
eBay is not in the auction business, it is in the business of interaction. Same as the phone company is not in the telephone wire business, it's in the conversation business.
So, we coined a new phrase to describe the way digital business can thrive: the medium is the interaction.
Consider the value of your PC before it was networked and after. A closed box has a more fixed value.
A connected box has a value that's the result of all the other boxes that it can connect with on a network to exchange some valuable interaction.
The same thing is happening or could happen in video games as they become networked.
And yet you hear nothing from AOL Time Warner about these obvious opportunities. They have become a kitchen with gourmet ingredients but no chef.
Music, movies, books, games. Each one of these is a medium begging for interaction. There are many things that can be done now. Building a Harry Potter website is not the holy grail of how to leverage a movie property.
And so the song plays on, "Say, Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take I say, Doctor, to relieve this belly ache? I say, Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take I say Doctor! let me get this straight
Put the lime in the coconut, drink them both together
Put the lime in the coconut, then you feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink them both down
Put the lime in the coconut, & call me in the morning" |
