Steve Case. He was out of his league with the meteoric rise of AOL and was simply at the helm of a ship being carried on the jet stream. Netscape brought on Jim

Steve Case. He was out of his league with the meteoric rise of AOL and was simply at the helm of a ship being carried on the jet stream. Netscape brought on Jim Barksdale because Marc A wasn't fit to lead NS. Google brought on Schmidt for the same reason. AOL never brought anyone else in because Steve was a fully grown adult, so no one was willing to recognize his inexperience at running a company that size. I'm not saying he was dumb or bad or anything such as that, simply that he was out of his league when AOL managed to grow so large. Plus, right after the NS and TW acquisitions, the dot-com bubble burst, and smaller properties like winamp and ICQ were ignored while the company focused on righting itself after a $100bn write down.