Word: accession
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gerald Levin and AOL boss Steve Case, the common experience of groping through a rapidly mutating economy made this deal in some ways inevitable. In AOL, Case had built a brand, a customer base and (by Internet standards) healthy profits. But he faced a future that may see Internet access become a commodity, and he lacked access to the leading source of broadband--the fat, fast pipes of cable television that could carry vast amounts of Internet content. And Case didn't have much in the way of content either. Time Warner's cable-television system, the country's second...
...course, has had no such problem. Ever since Case fought off the awful negative publicity surrounding the late 1996 fiasco in which customers couldn't access the overburdened servers, the company has been rocketing from one success to another. The number of AOL zillionaires has multiplied with each upward ratchet of the stock price, and the atmosphere in Dulles sometimes feels like it's ready to combust. The unnamed Time Warner executive who told the New York Times that merging the cultures would be easy because the AOL people are laid-back "latte drinkers" would do well to re-examine...
...then Time Inc., he worked in the company's cable-television division on 23rd Street in Manhattan. At the time, in those Pleistocene cable days, some genius had the idea of building a real-time TV news service that would allow Time Inc.'s cable subscribers to have direct access to the headlines, as opposed to having to wait for Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite or even, God forbid, the morning paper. To do this, Time Inc.'s wizards came up with a solution that would have done a kindergartner proud: first they purchased an AP teletype machine...
...shift applications such as databases and word processing from your computer to a server--appears to be preparing not only the technology but also the business model that can carry the company into a divested or undivested future. Just as you would have to visit AOL Time Warner to access its content, you will have to hit, or subscribe to, Microsoft's sites to use its services...
...course, the problem has precisely to do with "down the road"--two or three mergers down the road. Never mind that AOL's Case had been agitating for an FCC rule mandating nondiscriminatory access to Internet service providers (known as open access). Now that AOL has bought its own access, he seems to be saying that no governmental regulatory intervention is necessary. Good old AOL Time Warner will provide open access voluntarily...