Word: warner
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Finally, there will inevitably be personnel and turf issues to unravel some nerves, as already seems to be happening to some Time Warner executives suspicious of the sudden omnipresence in the media of Case's agile No. 2, the 45-year-old Pittman. Himself a former Time Warner executive, Pittman is the highest-ranking manager in either company who made his bones in both the entertainment business and the digital world. Within hours of the deal's announcement, the corporate handicappers had tabbed him as Levin's successor. He had better be patient. According to an investment banker who knows...
...which customers couldn't access the overburdened servers, the company has been rocketing from one success to another. The number of AOL zillionaires has multiplied with each upward ratchet of the stock price, and the atmosphere in Dulles sometimes feels like it's ready to combust. The unnamed Time Warner executive who told the New York Times that merging the cultures would be easy because the AOL people are laid-back "latte drinkers" would do well to re-examine what's in those cups...
...typical Time Warner manager, especially in its entertainment divisions, would never be mistaken for St. Francis of Assisi. But the deal-a-minute, scream-until-you-win culture of AOL is not likely to tolerate the stately pace of a company whose decision-making arteries are often clogged with consultants and task forces. California venture capitalist Jennifer Fonstad anticipates that the slightest whiff of old-economy culture in the halls of Dulles will create "a huge opportunity for headhunting. I can't underscore how excited many of us are at the prospect of getting good AOL executives and engineers...
Winning over Wall Street will require a prolonged process of--pick your noun--either education or spin. Music-business executive Danny Goldberg, a former head of Warner Bros. records, says the merger both "validates the Internet and validates the value of content." But it also forces the invention of a new currency to reflect it; as the AOL and TWX stock prices yo-yoed up and down last week, it was clear that investors had no idea how to put a price tag on something that was neither an Internet highflyer nor an old-economy cash-flow locomotive. AOL lost...
Along the way, there's business to be done. New media buccaneers refer to their easiest challenges as "low-hanging fruit," and in the merger announcement the two companies listed a series of efforts that would launch immediately: CNN.com programming featured on AOL services; AOL discs stuffed into Time Warner product shipments; cross-promotion of Warner Bros. movies on AOL-owned MovieFone. If none of these seems especially delicious, that's because low-hanging fruit rarely...