Monday, April 6, 2009
Time Warner on AOL: We Ought to Have That Removed…
Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.
Technically, the term refers to the frenzied flow of games and the intensity of the contenders for the NCAA Championship crown. But the NCAA doesn’t have a corner on “March Madness”–those descriptors work well in other instances, too. To wit:
Much ado about the Amazon Kindle 2.0 this week:
Rumor has it there are big games going on this weekend–at least one of which involves football players. The rest involve the usual players, though they might appear in different positions–and on different teams–from week to week. These games, most likely, will continue through Monday and beyond. Scores will be kept on an ongoing basis.
If Microsoft’s leadership were to author a 600-page guide to competitive strategy, it would consist of this sentence repeated over and over again, “The Shining” style for half of them: It’s always easier to buy your way into a profitable market, than earn it. So it is that, Microsoft–which has been paying people to use its Live Search engine to find and purchase products online–is now working to buy its way into the mobile search market by outbidding Google on the search giant’s deal with Verizon.
The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.
Looks like Carl Icahn did show up to his first Yahoo board meeting, though it appears he wasn’t able to get much done. The new board, which also includes former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former CEO of Nextel Partners, John Chapple, reportedly met Tuesday and decided as a first course of business to talk to Time Warner about the future of its AOL division.
Disciplined capital allocation is a key priority for Time Warner. That said, the company “may have overpaid” for Bebo, the social-networking site it acquired for $850 million cash back in March. So said Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in an interview with Portfolio.
In the past year, Microsoft has spent $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search outfit Fast Search & Transfer. The company spent more than $100 million on Powerset and its natural language search. It spent untold millions on R&D. Microsoft has even taken the rather extraordinary step of paying people to use its MSN/ Windows Live search. None of this has done much to prop up its laggard search service, which continues to toddle along behind Google and Yahoo–a very distant third in the search market.
