AOL's purchase of Netscape never amounted to anything more than a thank-you to the people who had run the most successful startup in history, a way of saving their baby from becoming a penny stock. I guess this is how it feels to have become a footnote in history. It's hard to know what to make of AOL Time Warner. I'm fairly confident the merger will work out. My interest is in how the deal seems to at once unleash and harness great power, all of it concentrated on how we communicate, and on how we share and find meaning and value in information.
Few things seem as basic as that.
I believe the deal's implications are broad, deep, and serious. But for those implications to become fully known, they'll first have to ripen into consequences. We're living in interesting times. America Online is a much tougher competitor without them. I'm not a fan of big mergers between companies with radically different business histories, focus, and cultures.