Why AOL Time Warner Failed

from the stamping-out-irrational-exuberance dept

Jason Pontin, over at Red Herring, has a good opinion piece on why AOL Time Warner failed. I've been pointing out that it's been a failure to execute properly - and Pontin agress by blaming the management. He also says that there were content problems and technology problems. By content problems he says that people don't want "converged" content yet. I think that they actually do want converged content - but they want it without restrictions. Unfortunately, all the content providers are scared to death of freeing their content, which has made it so that consumers couldn't care less. He concludes by saying something I completely agree with. One day, there will be a company that does what AOL Time Warner was supposed to do - and it may even be AOL Time Warner. But, it's apparently going to take quite a bit more time than some of us had hoped.