Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What perhaps astonished people most about last week's deal was that AOL could be buying Time Warner. But that is the nature of the Internet economy, making the impossible (or even the implausible) possible. The speed of the Net has served to condense into Case's short business life--he founded AOL 15 years ago--several lifetimes' worth of hardscrabble learning. AOL has had plenty of near death experiences--the launch of Microsoft's online service in 1995, the day AOL's entire service blipped off-line in 1996, the easily won reputation as America On Hold after...
Obvious as all this success seemed to Case--everyone was going to get online, right?--it was still a hard sell everywhere from Wall Street to, at times, his own boardroom. AOL spent more than $1 billion building its system. From a historical perspective this wasn't aberrant; communications networks always swam deeply in the red before emerging into profit. It was those insane costs that prompted the U.S. government to give Ma Bell her monopoly. But no one was giving Case a monopoly over anything. He'd have to fight for every cent...
...couple of days after the merger, Levin flew down to AOL's offices on one of the Time Warner jets for a meeting and a Case-led tour of the firm's network operations center. As Case walked Levin through the NORAD-like setup, he couldn't resist a dig. "How many simultaneous users did we have last night?" he shouted to one techie. "One point five million," came the answer. Case: "Hey, that beats CNN." Wink. Case explained to Levin how--and why--AOL's networks are built to be faster than regular Internet service providers...
...Case teaching Levin about instant messaging: the firm delivers 100 million e-mail messages a day--but more than a billion instant messages. Case argues that that's evidence of a whole new medium. Levin listens and suggests that it might be harnessed to support Time Warner products. An AOL techie points out that they can tell when popular programs come on TV by watching the network traffic fall as users log off. "You could use this to tell when it was time to kill a show," the techie suggests. "We can see when Friends' ratings are falling," he adds...
Judge Jackson, your honor, Microsoft would like to enter into the record the exhibit marked "AOL Time Warner...