I thought it at the time, but second guessed myself because I was young and figured corporations knew what they were doing. But I always thought AOL was a temporary thing. It was getting so uncool, so unuseful, and so generic so quickly that there was no way it would last. If there's shame in have an @yourdomain email address, I think you're finished. Internet time moves pretty quickly.
...Mr. Parsons was quoted as saying that he was, in fact, open to spinning off some AOL shares to the public. Then Barry Diller, an established Internet bargain hunter, said publicly that he had been interested in adding AOL to his holdings last year, but had turned up his nose at hints that the price would be $20 billion.
Whether or not AOL is about to be cast off, its reversal of fortune is striking. Five years ago, when its merger with Time Warner was announced, America Online alone was valued at $164 billion. Now, as it sets out to reinvent itself, its place within Time Warner is in question.
The merger has long since become a symbol of the misbegotten assumptions and skewed calculations among old and new media at the height of the technology bubble. And as Mr. Parsons's varying statements indicate, what to do about AOL is a pesky puzzle.
