Word: warner
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Within a year expect major initiatives in broadband, where AOL visionaries see their eventual future, and in recorded music, an area that has been less gold mine than minefield for Time Warner in the past few years. "We can change the way people interact with music, change the distribution medium," says Jonathan Sacks, the senior vice president who supervises the main AOL service. Contemplate a music company that no longer has to bother manufacturing or shipping CDs, or sharing revenue with retailers--one that distributes its music directly from its hard drive to yours...
Swallow. "I'm sorry. Wait a minute." Swallow. "Can I add something?" Time Warner chairman Jerry Levin is speaking. It is 9 a.m. on the day after Levin and Steve Case, the CEO of America Online, have inked the biggest deal in corporate history. Levin is nibbling on pieces of fruit, sipping room-temperature mineral water and projecting a becoming tranquillity. He looks as if he's just stepped in from Harvard Yard, wrapped in a forest green corduroy jacket with an open-necked plaid shirt tucked underneath. When he speaks, his voice has the delicate cadence of a professor...
...entertainment and information. It's a world, he says, where cell phones, televisions, computers, cars, maybe even refrigerators, will all be tapped into a data network that makes it as easy to talk to Singapore as to call your next-door neighbor. And AOL Time Warner, he begins to explain, will be the company that makes all that happen. But now Levin has something to say, so he puts the pager aside and begins to tell a story...
...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 a knife fight. "This is," both men kept insisting...
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...