<story><title>Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-billion-1431428458</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>georgeott</author><text>They owned a closed &amp;quot;Walled Garden&amp;quot; version of the internet.  Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.</text></item><item><author>tootie</author><text>AOL might be the ultimate company that missed the boat. They practically owned the internet in America in the 90s and just let the whole thing get away. They had pole position to be Google+Facebook at once.</text></item><item><author>WDCDev</author><text>To give you some perspective.&lt;p&gt;When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>billyhoffman</author><text>Yes. This. It&amp;#x27;s a reoccurring battle that all companies that build some kind of infrastructure &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; offer content&amp;#x2F;data services on that infrastructure end up facing.&lt;p&gt;When they built the pipes, there was no data&amp;#x2F;content, so they had to create it. But now there is so much more content&amp;#x2F;data that is so much better, and people just want to use these companies as a dumb pipe to get to the good stuff.&lt;p&gt;We see it now with cell phone carriers and cable TV companies who built infrastructure to transmit data, and also wanted to sell you content&amp;#x2F;data for that infrastructure. Hence phones from a decade ago full of bloatware and crappy ringtone stores and crappy Brew-based &amp;quot;app&amp;quot; stores, and cable providers who (still) have poor DVR interfaces and pay-per-view and TV packages.&lt;p&gt;The iPhone&amp;#x27;s most powerful innovation wasn&amp;#x27;t a touchscreen computer in your pocket. It was the business relationship with the cell phone carrier Cingular (and then AT&amp;amp;T). It was wedge that freed the device so people could control it (relatively) more, and allowed people to treat the network as a dumb pipe. Its still early, but Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc are largely doing the same thing to cable TV.&lt;p&gt;This goes back further than AOL. You can see it with AT&amp;amp;T, their refusal to allow 3rd party equipment on the POTS network, the rise of Sprint using their infrastructure, and their ultimate breakup.&lt;p&gt;Every time this battle has happened the infrastructure companies lose and get pushed into &amp;quot;dumb pipe.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-billion-1431428458</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>georgeott</author><text>They owned a closed &amp;quot;Walled Garden&amp;quot; version of the internet.  Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.</text></item><item><author>tootie</author><text>AOL might be the ultimate company that missed the boat. They practically owned the internet in America in the 90s and just let the whole thing get away. They had pole position to be Google+Facebook at once.</text></item><item><author>WDCDev</author><text>To give you some perspective.&lt;p&gt;When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r00fus</author><text>They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering.&lt;p&gt;They failed to do all of the above, and are now in the dustbin of history (and to me, are solely remembered for their acquisition of nullsoft who then created Gnutella - predecessor of P2P file sharing services).</text></comment>