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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JayPC who wrote (37069)	1/11/2000 3:43:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 41369

NYTIMES coverage:Though top executives of both companies presented the deal as a "merger of equals," it was in fact a victory for Stephen M. Case, the 41-year-old billionaire who built America Online from a fledgling dial-up service in the mid-1980's to an Internet powerhouse able to acquire the world's largest media company. ALSO:AOL: PURCHASE OF TIME WARNER (TWX) RADICALLY CHANGES THE LANDSCAPE, COMPANY'S FOCUS AND THE MEDIA INDUSTRY; STRONG BUY AND $106 PRICE TARGET REITERATED. Prudential Securities "America Online is clearly dominant," David Readerman, managing director of Thomas Weisel Partners, a San Francisco investment firm, said. "The nerds have won. This deal really validates the Internet." Even more so, it would appear to validate AOL, whose strategy was to market the freewheeling, global, often chaotic Internet as the suburbs of its online service. Techies long derided America Online as a lowbrow medium. They called it "training wheels for the Internet," suggesting it was not the real thing. But Mr. Case, who once developed new pizza offerings for Pizza Hut, always held his ground. He insisted that the online business was less about technology than about consumer marketing. His vision has proved on target so far, making America Online by far the biggest online service with 20 million subscribers. Just where the combined AOL Time Warner is headed is hard to predict, but the emphasis is certain to be the same -- a mass-market consumer service that is easy to use and hides the intimidating technology.