> None of the big ISP's from the 90's "made it".

AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are still chugging along, among others. Some of them aren't household names like Level 3 or CenturyLink.

> There truly was nothing they could have done.

It's 1996, sales are terrible, stock price is in the toilet, the newest product line isn't selling as well, and it was very expensive to develop as it moved to a different CPU architecture. Moreover, the operating system isn't getting better, despite numerous attempts to improve it.

There are numerous newspaper articles saying the company should just fold, and return all the money to the shareholders.

There was nothing they could have done to save the company either.

Except, of course, to bring back Steve Jobs; the company was Apple, and the rest is history.

It's easy to decry the obscene amounts CEOs receive in compensation, but the right one would have been able to right the sinking ship that was AOL. Of course we'll never know if it could have been saved, but it's interesting to think about the position AOL was in, back in the 90's.

The big one was the switch to DSL, which AOL didn't keep pace with. I don't even recall if they did start offering DSL. My internet experience in the 90's was interrupted dial-up and busy signals.

DSL changed all that, but AOL didn't want DSL, so they got left behind. Suddenly, instead of AOL being the cool new thing, it didn't just become staid, it become dysfunctional. Instead of wanting to be on AOL and putting up with busy signals, you kept AOL because you were trapped by the @aol.com email they gave you. The rise of Hotmail took away that last excuse.

I don't know about better search technology, but if AOL had gotten into the online catalog business, Amazon may not even have gotten off the ground. AOL had the brand name recognition, and a warchest to fund something that was clearly going to happen, it was just the small matter of who was going to win. Grocery delivery was unproven, but books? Literally any book in print (and even some out of print) is available in a few days, shipped to your house. Sign me up!

Meanwhile, AOL was content to collect money from their dial-up business.

I actually think buying up ISPs to jump start their entry into the DSL market would have worked out well, or at least slowed the downward spiral. It gets them off the shrinking dial-up as into the nascent high-speed broadband market. The purchase of a backbone internet provider, combined with their purchase of Time Warner in 2000 may have prevented Netflix from getting off the ground, and could have jump started the online video streaming business five years faster.

Finally, buying an equipment manufacture like Sun may not seem like it would have made sense, but with the racks and racks of computers they already owned, a vertically integrated and merged AOL and Sun could started the popularization of cloud services, helped along by their online catalog and online video services.

The benefit of writing this two decades years past AOL's heyday is that hindsight is always 20/20. But saying AOL was doomed, and there was no choice in the matter ignores any possible move they could have done along the way.

Compared to $166 billion, the purchase price of $4.4 billion is not very much at all, but that's still approximately $4.4 billion more money than I have.

AOL may not be the household name it once was, but it did manage to pivot away from the dial-up business, and over to the content business. It's just that the content business, even a $4.4 billion one, is a different market than everyone in America paying you a monthly fee to get on the Internet.

We're in the middle of a similar story with Yahoo, and time will tell if Marissa Mayer is be able to right that ship.