Breaking News: AOL Still Exists

I was always of the opinion that the AOL-Time Warner thing was a really dumb idea. The reason being: What the hell did AOL have to offer? They had nothing but over-valued stock and a shrinking market base with no real future. For Time Warner to purchase AOL was a dumb, dumb idea. But that's not what happened. Per the absurdist rules of the day, AOL purchased Time Warner; a real company with real assets. This seemed particularly stupid to me at the time and only seems dumber now.

And while I don't normally obsess on this point, I happened to be at Time Magazine's website and saw the headline Why AOL–Time Warner Wasn't Doomed to Failure. But having read the article, I can't imagine what the logic here is. It makes no sense. Yeah, sure, it didn't have to fail; but why did it even happen? What did AOL have to offer besides a high stock price that was based on fantasy numbers? And the author even goes as far as to mock people who think "synergy" is a bad word. Wow. I can't believe I just witnessed someone using that word in a non-ironic context.

And at the end of the article, they offer the only hint as to what AOL could be good at: Buying undervalued internet start-ups. Huh? Did I just enter a timewarp and we're all partying yet again as if it were 1999? Honestly, I just went and checked the timestamp on this article, just to make sure I wasn't reading old news. But no, someone at Time was actually paid to write an article suggesting that AOL purchasing Time Warner was a good idea, and seems to think that AOL has some magical ability to buy start-up companies. Simply amazing.

Some day, this country will have a group of journalists that actually knows what the hell they're talking about; and when that happens, all the blogs will shutdown, as we won't have anything to write about anymore. Until then, I'll have posts like this one.