Word: aol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fact, the hidden victory of the WorldCom deal is that it gives AOL a technological leg up. WorldCom is building bigger pipes--broadband, in the parlance--over which AOL can push a richer service. Although some industry watchers see broadband as a weapon for rivals like cable companies to use against AOL, Case naturally holds the opposite view that his product will be more effective in a new era. If AOL can attract 12 million users just with snappy graphics and chat, imagine what it will be able to do with full-motion video and stereo sound...
Imagine too what Microsoft can do. No company is a bigger threat, yet Microsoft is both partner and competitor for AOL. Case says it's a relationship based on "ambivalence and, to some extent, fear." Soon AOL will unveil new alliances with Microsoft that include everything from licensing the online magazine Slate--on AOL starting this fall--to becoming part of Microsoft's "Active Desktop," which will let AOL deliver information to Windows computers using new Microsoft technology. Pittman, for one, feels AOL holds a better hand: "Microsoft's destiny...
...biggest winner in the AOL-Compuserve deal may be WorldCom, the $4.5 billion phone company you probably never heard of, run by a cigar-chomping ex-basketball coach who isn't burdened by too much knowledge about the industry and his hard-wired, guitar-playing sidekick, who is. The whole operation is run out of a town that is not exactly known as a global telecommunications center: Jackson, Miss...
...telecommunications network. It has made 40 acquisitions in the past five years, including one that netted UUNet, the world's largest provider of high-speed hookups to the Internet. That's why WorldCom agreed to pay $1.2 billion for CompuServe and then traded that company's consumer subscribers to AOL in exchange for ANS, AOL's own networking and Internet-access division. "What they're trying to do is just incredible," says Steve Koppman, a senior analyst for Northern Business Information, a market-research group. "WorldCom is the communications company of the future...
...most notable has been Sidgmore, 46, a weekend rock guitarist who masterminded last week's AOL deal. Sidgmore worked out the three-way swap with AOL chairman Steve Case at a breakfast meeting in July. Voila! WorldCom now controls the networking divisions of CompuServe, AOL and the Microsoft Network, which was already in the fold. Yet neither Sidgmore nor Ebbers plans to stop adding to their empire anytime soon. Asked whether WorldCom will continue its voraciously acquisitive ways, Ebbers responds with typical bluntness, "Are we alive...