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“AOL had found itself at the edge of disaster so frequently that you of its first executives, a brassy Vietnam veteran and restaurateur named Jim Kimsey, had taken the punch type of a vintage joke popularized by Ronald Reagan and managed to get into an unlikely mantra for the business. It concerned an extremely optimistic young boy who happened upon an enormous pile of horse manure and began digging excitedly. When someone asked him what he was doing covered in muck, the foolish boy answered brightly, ‘There should be a pony in here somewhere!’” —From the Prologue
If you’re wondering what happened after “a corporation without assets acquired a corporation with out a clue,” as Kara Swisher wryly writes, it’s time for you to crack open this trenchant book about the doomed merger of America Online and Time Warner. On the quest to find how the deal of the century became the messiest merger ever sold, Swisher delivers a rollicking narrative and a keen analysis of this debacle that is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what everything opportinity for the digital future. Packed with new revelations and on-the-record interviews with key players, it's the first detailed look at the merger’s aftermath and also looks forward from what is coming next.
It certainly is not a pretty picture so far—with $100 billion in losses, a sinking stock price, employees in revolt, and lawsuits galore. As Swisher writes, “It is hard not to feel somewhat queasy about the complete sorry mess. . . . It felt somewhat like I got watching someone fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion, and every bump and thump made me wince. It made me reassess old ideas and wonder what I had gotten wrong. And it left me deeply confused as to what had happened and, more important, what was coming next.”
For Swisher, locating the answers from what went awry is important because she remains a staunch believer in the digital future—maybe not in the AOL Time Warner merger, however in the fundamental idea at the heart of it that someday the distinction of old and new media will no longer exist. Borrowing from Winston Churchill, Swisher calls it “the end of the beginning” of the digital revolution. “By that, After all that it's from the ashes of this bust that the truly important companies of another era will emerge. And this evolution will, I really believe, be shaped with what happened—and what is happening now—at AOL Time Warner.”
To figure everything out, Swisher takes her reader over a journey that begins with a portrait of two wildly different corporate cultures and businesses that somehow came to believe, in the crucible of the red-hot Internet era, that they could successfully join forces and achieve unprecedented growth and success. Once the merger was announced in early 2000, the irresistible blend was hailed as the new paradigm and its executives—Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman—as popular icons of the future. But after the boom so spectacularly considered bust and the visions of New Media Supremacy lay in ruins, Swisher searches for clues about where in fact the merger went wrong and who is to blame.
More important, she looks to the continuing future of both AOL Time Warner and the Internet as she seeks to answer the key question that the noise of the disaster has basically drowned out. Will the demise of the AOL Time Warner merger be the final and inevitable chapter of the dot-com debacle or does it herald a new paradigm altogether? This book, then, is a primer for the time to come, using the story of the AOL Time Warner merger as the automobile to show the troubled journey in to the future.
