Not a bang, but with a whimper

Steve Case has left TimeWarner.

Back in 2000, this would have been HUGE news. As it is, I got it from BBC and it was sorta buried there.

AOL was the first online service to really hit it big. I first saw it in 1992 and I remember thinking, "This is the future." That was two or three years before I heard the words Internet or World-Wide-Web, and it's amazing how much AOL, even in those days, presaged the Web experience.

The AOL-TimeWarner merger was questioned from Day 1, and it's still not clear what the end result will be. It's pretty clearly a short- and medium-term failure, but the jury's still out on the long-term results. Can the AOL brand be saved and returned to glory? I don't see how it can, but then I'm not Richard Parsons. Thank goodness.

Regardless, if success is in the future for AOL or TimeWarner as a whole, it will be accomplished with the great Steve Case involved. An era is over.