Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...code name for their "Bizarro Comics" project, it should have been "Faust." This deluxe, hardcover book brings together many of alterna-comix best talents to write and draw stories using the many superheroes, like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, owned by mainstream behemoth DC (owned by AOL Time Warner, the same parent company as this website.) Would there be a price to pay for playing with the big, bad money? Sure enough, a whiff of sulfur may fill your nostrils as you plunk down your...
...AOL could scarcely have found a more muscular partner in China than Legend. The computer maker dominates the country's home-PC market, with a 40% share. (Sales totaled $2.2 billion last year.) Legend's chief financial officer, Mary Ma, the company's main negotiator on the deal, says the Chinese firm initiated the courtship. Legend, she says, was convinced that, with the WTO's open market pending, it needed a sophisticated foreign partner to help differeniate itself in the market...
...underlying question for AOL is how an Internet company dedicated to the free flow of information can operate in a tightly controlled country. Beijing routinely blocks websites, including this magazine's, that report on what's happening in China, and it is intensifying a campaign against cybercafEs, closing down almost 2,000 in the past few weeks. AOL's CEO Gerald Levin, who flew to Beijing for the announcement, stressed in a press conference that the company's commitment to editorial independence applies "to the journalistic enterprises within our company from TIME magazine to CNN," while AOL's communications service...
...Despite the culture clash, the partners hammered out the basic framework for the venture at their first formal meeting, a whirlwind visit by Legend's top executives to AOL's Dulles, Virginia headquarters in June 2000. They decided almost immediately that it would be an equal partnership, according to Legend CEO Yang Yuanqing. (To comply with current China law, Legend will have a 51% stake.) The partners also quickly agreed on a business model that would combine Legend's hardware and AOL's Internet services. "There were problems throughout the negotiations," concedes Yang. "But from the beginning, both sides...
...deal ratchets up the pressure for China's struggling former Internet darlings such as Sohu, Netease and Sina to find powerful foreign partners of their own. Even as they cope with serious internal troubles, executives from Sina and Netease shared a table at the AOL-Legend celebratory banquet in Beijing, which struck some as a symbolic wake for China's early homegrown Internet businesses. Now all will be watching to see if this new venture can figure out what those ventures never could: how to make money...