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The quote is entirely accurate. AOL was spun off on December 9, 2009.
by nudge 16y ago
The quote is entirely accurate. AOL was spun off on December 9, 2009.
- Vivtek 16y agoA man is lost in a balloon in fog; a building looms up out of the fog and another man looks out the window. The man in the balloon says, "Excuse me, but can you tell me where I am?" The man in the building says, "You're in a balloon." The man in the balloon thanks him, because he answered the question perfectly correctly, yet in such a way that he was given no new information, thus allowing the man in the balloon to conclude that the building was Microsoft Customer Service and he was therefore in Redmond, Washington.
- DrSprout 16y agoIronic that we're reading this article from a bastion of "pay for high quality" and such is the quality we receive.
- nudge 16y agoSeriously, what would you have preferred? "AOL, a web portal which was recently spun off from Time Warner, a media giant, but which a decade ago actually bought Time Warner." Is that better? Does it make any difference?
- Vivtek 16y agoSeriously? Either assume that thinking people who have an interest in business already know what AOL is (instead of implying that there is mysteriously an adult businessperson who has never heard of AOL), or in your definition of "AOL", give a concise summary of its history with a time horizon greater than three years. The sentence that was actually included was jarring in its isolation from reality, and that's not really what you expect from the Economist.
- carbocation 16y agoAOL was the Internet giant that bought Time Warner. The new conglomerate then shed the AOL properties in Dec 2009. The quote makes it sound like Time Warner was the 'big dog', but in truth, AOL was. For a time.
- nudge 16y agoI'm aware of the history, and I'm sure the writer of that Economist article is as well. The quote isn't misleading: AOL was spun out of the conglomerate, not Time Warner. It's not really necessary for an article only tangentially about either of these companies to go into their history to mention that, in the past, one was worth a lot more. It's just not very important for the story. If the story had been about Time Warner and AOL, then that would be relevant background, but the story wasn't about that.