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...thing is clear: This is the make-it-or-break-it millennium for AOL Time Warner. By the year 3000, or maybe even sooner, we will have answers to the questions that plague us this week, such as, Can we talk about something else, please? Is synergy the same thing as convergence or something different but equally wonderful? How many more times in the next 1,000 years can the same story be told? Tweedy Time Inc. makes a jazzy marriage (a movie studio! a cable-TV network! an Internet dotcom!), a clash of cultures, a triumph...
Actually, I have the answers right now. But first, a few disclosures are necessary. Readers have the right to know that TIME magazine will be part of AOL Time Warner. The author of this essay, by contrast, has a day job as editor of Slate, an online magazine published by Microsoft. Microsoft owns an online service, msn, that competes with AOL. Microsoft and AOL Time Warner will have competing investments in the cable industry. On yet another hand, Microsoft and Time Warner are co-investors in a high-speed cable-Internet connection business called Roadrunner. On a fourth hand, Microsoft...
Readers should also take into consideration that Microsoft is a partner with NBC, which is owned by General Electric, in an all-news cable channel, MSNBC, which competes with CNN, which is owned by AOL Time Warner. What's more, the editor in chief of MSNBC.com the cable channel's affiliated website, is my mother's brother's wife's aunt's husband's nephew, which obviously makes it difficult for me to evaluate objectively the merits of a merger between a company (AOL) that recently bought the company (Netscape) that makes the Internet browser that competes with the browser...
...wait. It's not that simple, I'm afraid. CNBC competes directly with CNN/fn, the financial-news cable channel that will be owned by AOL Time Warner. I don't need to spell out the implications of that for you, do I? Well, perhaps I do. Look: this very article you are reading is in a magazine published by a company that owns a cable channel that competes with another cable channel that is half owned by a company (Dow Jones) that also half owns a magazine (SmartMoney) that competes with another magazine (MONEY) owned by the company that publishes...
Here, then, is the guts of the issue. If Jack Welch of GE, whom I've never met, were nonetheless to appear at my door and say, "I hear you're writing about the AOL-Time Warner merger. I hope you'll keep in mind that I'm CEO of the company that co-owns a cable channel and a website with the company that writes your paycheck, and the company you're writing about owns a magazine that published a damned fine picture of me recently," would I have the ethical backbone to say, "Obviously that occurred...