Word: aol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...left elbow, has been doing a little samba of his own. The Steve Case dance will be familiar to anyone who has been within two feet of a mailbox in the past decade, where Case's dance card came along with a disk inviting the recipient to join AOL. So far, 20 million have taken him up on the offer. Case, who was raised in Hawaii and is partial to batik shirts, seems to have ditched his old look wherever Levin left his Gulfstream. Besuited and betied, Case is also clearly bewitched by a vision of a world where consumers...
...create the American cable industry, Case the nation's mass online connection. Each has survived failure. Last week their story looked new, but each man will tell you it's also as old as the history of technology. Geek meets geek. Geeks fall in love. Geeks get married. At AOL's headquarters in Dulles, Va., and at Time Warner's in Manhattan, there was hope that these nerd nuptials might join the ranks of other great pocket-protector romances: Hewlett and Packard, Allen and Gates. But there was also a worry that these two might somehow turn their partnership into...
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...