Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Saturday morning, and Dick Parsons was working out on the exercise equipment in his Manhattan apartment when he got the message. Steve Case, chairman of AOL Time Warner, wanted to talk right away. Parsons, the company's chief executive, finished his regimen, then returned the call. "Are you sitting down?" Case asked. Then he unleashed the news: he was resigning...
...company (which owns TIME) can use all the help it can get. Ever since Case, then head of AOL, and Gerald Levin, then chief of Time Warner, agreed two years ago to complete the $106 billion deal in which the online upstart bought the old-media giant, their union has produced a Shakespearean torrent of pain and recrimination. As the Internet bubble burst and advertising slid into recession, the company's executives were slow to adjust their lavish profit-growth promises to Wall Street, which struck back hard. Having tumbled from a high of $56.60, the price of AOL Time...
...days after Case's resignation, speculation arose that some outside stockholders were trying to force the company to bring in Viacom president Mel Karmazin, but no one could produce evidence that anyone in charge at AOL had spoken with him. Instead, the AOL board acted swiftly to elect Parsons as both chairman and CEO, strengthening his hand as he takes on one of the toughest turnaround tasks in corporate America...
...gone. Thursday, AOL Time Warner announced that current CEO Richard Parsons would assume Case's post as well. Yet nobody is quite giving up on the world Case and Gerald Levin were betting on three years ago - whenever it may arrive. "Resignation May Help Ground a Visionary Medium," a New York Times story suggested; "Steve Case, Genius" was the title of an Op-Ed by journalist Nina Munk, who is writing abook on the travails of the combined company. "It took more than seven years before Wall Street acknowledged that the 1990 merger of Time and Warner was a success...
...Case himself said Monday, "It's not over till it's over." If indeed the content-on-demand promise of broadband is realized, AOL Time Warner seems well-enough positioned to be a winner. But even if Steve Case's vision for the combined company - and the Internet economy - comes to pass, the test of his personal legacy will be whether AOL itself is still relevant when it does...