AOL/Time Warner: the Internet of Bullshit

Originally published in MacUser, 21 January 2000

As we go to press, Time Warner and AOL have announced a merger that will create one of the world’s largest companies. They missed the millennium by a week or so, but as a portent of Armageddon you couldn’t do much better.

Time Warner is a real company with real assets. True, some of its finest assets aren’t ‘real’ in the legal sense, which distinguishes physical property, like cinemas, from intellectual property, like movies. Time Warner owns thousands of movies, cartoons, music and TV footage. But these content holdings are real in the looser sense that they’re proper stuff, not crap.

What AOL owns is mainly crap. Or, to be more precise, bullshit.

Steve Case, a technophobe pizza marketeer, founded AOL because he thought bulletin board systems were too hard to use. He was right. But it wasn’t AOL that replaced BBSs. When the rise of the Internet enabled unfettered, standardised access to cyberspace, proprietary services like AOL should have quietly died. Instead, AOL grew stronger, selling a marginally improved installation experience and a handful of content to users who knew no better.

And that’s what AOL brings to the deal in which it effectively takes over Time Warner: the ‘goodwill’ of 20 million consumers, plagued for a decade by buggy software, non-standard email services, uncompetitive fees, and hard sell techniques such as taking credit card numbers for ‘free’ trials, then charging users if they forgot to disconnect.

Case would have us believe the inflated price of Internet stocks such as AOL is now vindicated. But by what? The shareholders of a real company have been persuaded to invest in bullshit. Shares may go up as well as down, but bullshit will always be bullshit. And sooner or later it will be found out.

What does all this have to do with Apple? Well, a couple of years ago, with Apple at its lowest point ever, the idea arose that it should become a software company. Look at Microsoft, people said. Why mess about building hardware? The profitable future is in software. Middleware. Enabling technologies… Fortunately, at this point Steve Jobs returned and set about building hardware like hardware had never been built before. Making real money from real product. And Apple became a real company again.

But at this month’s Macworld Expo, with Apple at the highest point ever, Jobs launched no hardware. Instead he unveiled an ‘Internet strategy’ consisting of a tie-in with an ISP a tenth the size of AOL; free email and Web space for Mac users; and an online greetings card service.

Perhaps the lack of hardware was simply down to bad timing. Perhaps Jobs’ passion for lame online services was feigned. Perhaps it was all just a bad dream induced by an artefact-ridden QuickTime Webcast. I hope so. Because in five years’ time, the Looney Tunes will still be funny, but the joke of bullshit Internet companies may be wearing thin.

[Edit (2017): It was not wearing thin]