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Strategies & Market Trends : Keep Your Eye On The Ball - Watch List -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TFF who wrote (1776)	7/22/2002 10:18:56 PM
From: TFF	Respond to of 2802

AOL Absorbed by the Media Giant It Took Over There was reason for swagger. For many people, AOL was the Internet -- half of all first-time Internet users experienced the Web via AOL. In so-called "mindshare" surveys of the time -- measuring how familiar a company name is to a consumer -- AOL topped corporate legends such as IBM. To Time Warner, AOL looked compelling. A media company that was itself the product of several spectacular mergers, Time Warner had 140 magazines; Warner Bros. pictures, television and music; New Line Cinema; HBO; Time Warner Cable; and Turner Broadcasting, which includes the WB television network, CNN and TNT. Time Warner chief executive Gerald M. Levin was known as a philosopher-king CEO. He believed in the digital future of entertainment, but had only unsuccessful attempts to show for it, such as Pathfinder, a money-losing Web site meant to organize all of Time's magazines. AOL founder Stephen M. Case sold Levin on the merger, analysts believe, by convincing him that AOL could effectively market Time Warner's content, and also by appealing to Levin's desire to captain the biggest ship. "Along comes Steve Case who says three magic letters: Not 'AOL' but 'CEO,' " said Jeffrey Rayport, chief executive of Marketspace, a media and high-tech research firm in Cambridge, Mass. Suddenly, AOL -- once an ISP pack member alongside Compuserve and Prodigy -- had its name at the front of the world's biggest media company, AOL Time Warner. The $112 billion deal created a conglomerate of entertainment, news and information, all meant to flow to consumers through the nation's top Internet service provider, AOL, in addition to the traditional ways. But many Time Warner executives weren't sold on the union. They regarded AOL as arrogant new money, according to one former AOL executive. He said Time Warner people cringed at the pictures of Levin and Case hugging on the day the deal was announced It didn't help that AOL people kept using that DNA line. As chief operating officer of the new-media colossus, Pittman had the job of getting the company's many parts working together, the AOL way.