The AOL Time Warner Disaster | TTYL, AOL | 4

Summary

Business Wars: The AOL Time Warner Disaster | TTYL, AOL | Episode 4 Summary

Host: David Brown
Guest: Nina Monk, Author of Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner
Release Date: August 7, 2025

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1. Introduction to the AOL Time Warner Saga

In this gripping episode of Business Wars, host David Brown delves into one of the most infamous mergers in corporate history: the union between America Online (AOL) and Time Warner. Featuring insights from Nina Monk, the author of Fools Rush In, the episode unpacks the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of what was once the most powerful conglomerate in the media and technology sectors.

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2. The Rise of AOL in the 1990s

AOL was a cultural phenomenon in the 1990s, symbolizing the early days of the internet. It was ubiquitous, featuring prominently in popular media such as You Got Mail, Sex and the City, and The Simpsons. With hundreds of millions of users, AOL was the digital lifeline for families and friends to stay connected through email and instant messaging.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [09:20]: “By the mid-90s, AOL wasn't just the most powerful brand in cyberspace; it was one of the most powerful brands in the world.”

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3. The AOL-Time Warner Merger: Ambition Meets Desperation

As the dot-com bubble began to burst, AOL’s soaring stock prices made it an attractive partner for Time Warner, a legacy media giant struggling with substantial debt. Time Warner, under CEO Jerry Levin, was desperate to find a catalyst to revitalize the company. AOL, led by Steve Case, represented the internet revolution that Time Warner believed could transform its stagnant revenues.

Notable Quote:

David Brown [12:36]: “Steve Case was driven by fear and uncertainty, leading to the biggest merger up to that point: AOL and Time Warner.”

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4. Cultural Clash: Two Titans at Odds

The merger brought together two vastly different corporate cultures. AOL was youthful, unconventional, and operated with a "move fast and break things" mentality. In stark contrast, Time Warner was old-school, formal, and meticulously structured. This cultural dichotomy was never bridgeable, leading to friction from the outset.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [17:49]: “Time Warner’s board meetings were elegant and formal, while AOL’s were chaotic, with executives putting their feet on the table and taking a frat party approach.”

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5. The Fallout Begins: Immediate Signs of Trouble

The merger was hastily orchestrated, with negotiations occurring overnight and the deal being announced just four days later. This rushed process left little room for proper due diligence, fostering an environment of mistrust and animosity between the two companies' executives. Time Warner’s senior staff felt blindsided and betrayed, as many were informed of the merger simultaneously with the public announcement.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [25:12]: “The AOL and Time Warner executives despised each other from day one, creating an environment ripe for conflict and failure.”

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6. The Decline: From Booming Stock to Disaster

Shortly after the merger in January 2000, the realities of the dot-com bubble burst began to impact both companies. By mid-2000, stock prices for both AOL and Time Warner were plummeting. Internal doubts emerged, with Time Warner executives urging Levin to reconsider the deal. Levin, however, was steadfast, believing in the merger's long-term benefits despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [28:19]: “Within months, the once buoyant stock prices began to falter, and doubts about the merger’s viability became impossible to ignore.”

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7. Lessons Learned: The Aftermath and Legacy

The AOL-Time Warner merger is now studied as a cautionary tale of how not to integrate companies with incompatible cultures and rushed strategic planning. The failure led to significant financial losses, with AOL's stock devastatingly losing 95% of its peak value. Time Warner, burdened by debt and mismanagement, struggled to regain its former glory.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [29:39]: “The biggest casualties were Main Street investors whose 401(k)s were heavily tied to the stock, highlighting the human cost of corporate miscalculations.”

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8. Nostalgia Segment: The Legacy of AIM

Post-merger discussions shift to the cultural impact of AOL, specifically AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Pioneering real-time online communication, AIM became an integral part of internet history, influencing modern messaging platforms like iMessage, Slack, and WhatsApp.

Notable Quote:

Nick Cannon [34:37]: “AIM was super addictive because it was synchronous. It allowed real-time conversations that felt incredibly intimate for the time.”

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9. Conclusion: Reflections on a Corporate Catastrophe

The Business Wars episode concludes by reflecting on the deep-seated issues that led to the AOL-Time Warner merger's failure. It underscores the importance of cultural compatibility, thorough due diligence, and realistic forecasting in corporate mergers.

Notable Quote:

Nina Monk [27:09]: “Jerry Levin was convinced this merger was flawless, failing to recognize the fundamental differences that would ultimately lead to its downfall.”

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Final Thoughts

Business Wars masterfully narrates the rise and fall of AOL and Time Warner, providing listeners with an in-depth understanding of the factors that led to one of the most significant corporate failures in history. Through expert insights and engaging storytelling, the episode serves as both a historical account and a valuable lesson in business strategy and leadership.

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For more detailed insights and to explore other episodes of Business Wars, listen on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[David Brown]

Wondery subscribers can binge all episodes of Business the AOL Time Warner Disaster, early and ad free. Right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars. Today, America Online is but a shadow of what it once was, now existing as a subsidiary of Yahoo, owned by a private equity company. But in the 1990s, AOL was everywhere.

[Nina Monk]

My breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words. I was just asking if you ever got my email. Shoe Gal. What? That's my screen name, Shoe Gal. If you need to reach me, my email is chunky lover53ol.

[David Brown]

AOL had cameos in the 1998 ROM com, you Got Mail, Sex in the City, and the Simpsons, to name a few. And that's because AOL was the moment, getting hundreds of millions of users connected across the world. Whether you were emailing your family across the country or sending an instant message to your friend across the hall, AOL was your gateway to staying in touch digitally. But when the dot com bubble burst and their merger with legacy media company Time Warner fell apart in the early aughts, AOL hit hard times. The cultural clash was tough to look past. The AOL crew, led by founder Steve Case, was young, unconventional, and a bit like a fraternity. The Time Warner Group, led by CEO Jerry Levin, was more old school, serious, refined. And the two just couldn't see eye to eye. To say the merger crashed out would be an understatement. Nina Monk is the author of Fools Rush In, Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. As a reporter, Nina had a front row seat to this failed partnership. She joins us to piece together what really went down and how it all fell apart. Later, we'll hear from some of the top names on our Business wars buddy list, Wired's Lauren Good and Michael Claure. The pair co hosts the Wired podcast Uncanny Valley, which goes inside the biggest stories coming out of Silicon Valley. They're logging on to chat with us about AOL Instant messenger, better known as AIM or AIM. The platform was laid to rest in 2017, but its impact lives every time we send a text, Slack message or dm. So let's get ready to dial up and dial in, because all that's coming up. As business owners and managers, you use software for your business every day. You use one piece of software to manage your customers, another to manage your employees, another to manage your finances. And the list goes on. You buy these pieces independently and hope they fit neatly together, like A puzzle. And then you find out the hard way that they don't. And you end up with a mess at the heart of your business operations. Does any of this sound familiar? Well, fortunately, Zoho offers a solution to this chaos. It's called Zoho One. Zoho One is a suite of around 50 pre integrated business applications that fit together beautifully. So instead of dealing with disparate software from multiple vendors with multiple contracts and price points, you deal with one vendor with all the pieces of the business software puzzle neatly put together, offered at a very attractive price. Now, if this sounds interesting to you, you gotta check out Zoho 1. At Zoho 1, that's z o h o dot o n e. With Zoho, you're not just licensing apps, you're licensing peace of mind. After telling hundreds of stories about business battles throughout history, I've learned one constant truth. Having the right support systems in place can make or break a new venture. Trust me, it was a battle even I faced on my business journey. That's why AT&T business makes so much sense for entrepreneurs today. When you're building something from scratch, or even just at the point where you're ready to grow, you need a provider that makes things easy. With AT&T business, you can have reliable, protected Internet connection you can count on, so you do not miss a beat. Building your dream might take time and a lot of work, but that doesn't mean it can't be a little easier. Wake up to the power of ATT business and turn your vision into reality. Business.att.com Nina Monk. Welcome to Business Wars.

[Nina Monk]

Thanks for having me.

[David Brown]

How long have you been covering business and tech? I feel like I've been seeing your byline since the.

[Nina Monk]

Oh, you're really making me sound terribly old.

[David Brown]

Oh, come on, come on. If that's the case, then I must be terribly old too, because I've been reading them.

[Nina Monk]

Look, I have to say that I was incredibly lucky. I came out of journalism school at Columbia right in the early 90s as business journalism was taking off. I mean, it was a marvelous moment for journalism generally, particularly compared today. But for business journalism, you know, wow, what a moment.

[David Brown]

I understand early on in your career you were like, what, at Fortune?

[Nina Monk]

I actually started my career at Forbes, which was a terrific place in the early 90s. I was then at Fortune, as you say, and surrounded by some of the most talented journalists of the era. And then I joined Vanity Fair. And now you look back and realize that this was this particularly rich moment. And There was this obsession, I suppose, with the rise of moguls and mega mergers and the way in which corporate chieftains had become celebrities.

[David Brown]

I was gonna say that must have been a kind of plumb beat for, well, for anyone to be at Vanity Fair. Graydon Carter, I guess, what tells you he wants you to cover aol.

[Nina Monk]

He was really a dream editor, I gotta say, because he just was one of those kinds of editors. I mean, I was lucky to have a few marvelous editor back then, but Graydon was just terrific. He would come back from a dinner party and pick up the phone and he'd say, you know, Nina, I heard about this thing, this aol. Can you, like, just go and do a story? And I ended up covering right from the beginning because I had just left Fortune, which was owned by Time Warner. And so I ended up pretty well right from the beginning, covering the AOL Time Warner deal for Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. And that's how I finally wrote the book.

[David Brown]

How much experience, prior to sort of getting the order to cover this? How much experience, personal experience, had you had with aol?

[Nina Monk]

You know, we forget again. Talk about making myself sound terribly old. But I remember distinctly I was working for Forbes magazine in the Los Angeles bureau at the time. It was maybe 1993, 92. And I had a very clever bureau chief who was into all things technology. And he said, you know, there's this thing called aol and we can. If we get the discs and we can. I'm gonna convince headquarters to pay for this. And I remember so well the first time, you know, we all got those discs, which the landscape was littered with these AOL CDs that you had to upload to your computer, I remember. And then you'd plug in the copper cable from your computer into the wall, you know, the old telephone wires, and you had to literally dial up. And six times out of ten, it didn't work. And you'd kind of just sit there like an idiot, waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen. And I think for Anyone born post 1990, at this point, I think it's really hard to understand why. What the Internet was before the Internet, effectively. I mean, I remember when I was in university, you know, kind of still in the. In the late 80s and even the early 90s, where what we did understand of this thing called the Internet was they were more like gated communities. Until you had Netscape, until you actually had a browser, it was all so limited and it seemed so unlikely that it could become something enormous for sure.

[David Brown]

And you could get into the community if you had the CD that you could get for free, the AOL cd. And then it was like opening up the world. And email. I remember that we loved to hear you've Got mail, of course.

[Nina Monk]

And I think that is now part of our cultural history. But, you know, by the time you get to the mid-90s, AOL wasn't just by then the most powerful brand in what we used to call cyberspace. It was really one of the most powerful brands in the world. It had demystified the Internet, and it had made it so innocuous and so unintimidating, you know, And I remember Steve Case, the head of aol, saying, we want to be the Coca Cola of the online world. We don't care about technology. We're not a technology company. And that is this moment. That is when everything changed and it went mainstream.

[David Brown]

Let me ask you something. Since you literally wrote the book on what happened with AOL and Time Warner. Was AOL in this period when everyone knew what it was, most everyone that you knew was using AOL in one way or another. Was AOL making a lot of money?

[Nina Monk]

You know, it's interesting, I have to say, at least when AOL went public, they were just, I think, starting to break even, if I'm remembering correctly. But one of the amazing things about this era, what we used to call the.com era, it was really that the whole world had turned upside down, that the old models no longer applied. It was this whole new game. And historically, you absolutely did not go public until your company was very profitable. The Microsofts of the world certainly didn't go public until they were very profitable. And there were all these clearly defined rules of investing and sort of sensible, thoughtful models for how companies were evaluated in a kind of old school, almost, maybe now, Warren Buffett, like, very traditional way of looking at the world. Now we understand. It wasn't that the big idea was wrong. This thing called the Internet was indeed a revolution. It's that there was no way to predict at that time which firms would actually endure or thrive, which ones were just in the end, shells. You know, AOL was wiped out, more or less. That stock price, which climbed 6,000% just two or three years after its IPO, just fell out of nowhere, literally fell 95% from its peak. And it took a full decade to come back.

[David Brown]

Exactly. And this was when a lot of Americans realized, wait a minute, a lot of this is the sort of wizard of Oz thing.

[Nina Monk]

Exactly.

[David Brown]

That we've got things going on, on this screen that we're all spending more and more time with. And we have these names, aol, for example, but they weren't making the money. They had cash flow, but they, they weren't profitable. I think it's important to return back to Steve Case because he was one of these tech celebrities that we're talking about here and he had his own concerns about the future of aol. And I, I get the sense that he was driven by that fear, that uncertainty. You know, that was ultimately the genesis for what would become the biggest merger that we had ever seen up to that point. The AOL Time Warner merger.

[Nina Monk]

No, I think you've hit the nail on the proverbial head. You know, I think what Steve Case did that not many people were able to do at that point was he was able to pull back and recognize that he had, in effect, this currency in the AOL stock. But there were very clear signs that the people who worked at aol, certainly those at the highest levels of management, knew that something was off. You didn't know whether it was all going to collapse tomorrow or in four years, but something was entirely off kilter. We'd had a stock price, AOL stock price that had just two years had gone from $2 a share to $40 a share. Suddenly, if you had invested $11,000 in the IPO, by the time that the Time Warner deal was announced, you would have had $8 million of AOL stock. I mean, wow. And almost overnight you saw the AOL parking lot in their, what had been a very modest office in Dulles, Virginia, filled with once Toyotas and Fords were suddenly replaced by Porsches and BMW roadsters and custom made Ferraris. And there were, at one count I remember reporting that by 1999 there were more than 2,000 millionaires working at AOL. And the 1999 issue of the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans that year had four people who worked at AOL alone, including Steve Case, who was then worth one and a half billion dollars. And you had again, a company not just the wealth it had created in that bubble, because there's nothing else to call it at this point, but this was a company that was being valued on Wall street in terms of its market capitalization. AOL America online by early 1999 was worth more than Disney and Time Warner. It was worth more than Philip Morris, Bell Atlantic, IBM, and all of those companies had revenues that dwarfed aol. I mean, Time Warner alone had five times more revenue than aol. But in the view of Wall street, nothing could compare to the promise of AOL's growth. And I don't know if you remember the name Henry Blodgett. He was kind of at the time, the infamous Internet stock analyst. And I, and I remember distinctly quoting him in one of my articles. And he specifically said, you know, we look at AOL in the same vein as Coca Cola or Gillette. You know, this is the ultimate American company. Well, Coca Cola still exists and so does Gillette. But wish I could say the same for aol.

[David Brown]

Time for a short break. My guest is Nina Monk, author of Fools Rush In, Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. Now when we come back, we're going to look at the merger gone wrong and a cultural clash that led to AOL's quiet retreat from the limelight.

[Lauren Good]

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[David Brown]

Welcome back to Business Wars. Nina Monk is the author of Fools Rush in and has covered AOL since the 1990s at publications like Fortune, Forbes and Vanity Fair. Nina, we know that AOL and Time Warner came into this infamous merger with two completely opposite identities. AOL had the more Move fast and break things mentality. And Time Warner had the old school, by the book way of doing things. Can you say more about the cultural differences between these two companies?

[Nina Monk]

Yeah, that's definitely putting it. Definitely putting it very mildly. You know, one of my favorite anecdotes in this, this is from after the deal has been announced. The deal is coming together, they're trying to figure out how to work together. And they had their AOL and Time Warner had their first joint board meeting. And I remember Jerry Levin telling me about it, and I think it was the first moment where he understood very clearly what so many of his lieutenants had wanted. Been warning all along that the cultural differences between these two companies was so immense that it couldn't possibly be bridged. Traditionally, Time Warner's board meetings had been these very formal, serious affairs run by Levin as chairman and CEO. There was a seating plan, a printed agenda that people followed ritually, item by item. Each director's place at the table had a was marked with a black leather portfolio embossed with his or her initials. There was an elegant three course lunch in the Time Warner building in Rockefeller center with uniformed waiters who would balance sterling trays. There was scotch and sherry served in crystal glasses. And you get the idea. I mean, this is real elegant, old school, WASPy, traditional stuff for the first time. Suddenly, this is in July 2000. For the first time in Jerry Levin's decade as the CEO of Time Warner, he was now sharing control with aol. And AOL boards had always been chaotic. Directors would just chat and say whatever they wanted. People would put their feet up on the table. Any executive who wanted to walk in and out could come. And Jerry Levin looks over this boardroom table. It's in Dulles, Virginia, and the table's littered with bags of Cheetos and Pringles. And the Aolers are drinking Snapple iced tea. That was then a big thing, you know, right straight from the bottle. And the meeting turns into literally screaming matches. And Levin was shocked. And I remember he said to me, nina, it went on endlessly. It was like. He described it to me as a frat party. Said, it just wasn't what I was used to. There was this. And I remember someone, because he said there was a lack of discipline and decorum. And I remember thinking, my goodness, that was the first time that you recognized that, you know, had this not occurred to you much, much earlier? You know, Time Warner, as you know, had come out of one of the oldest, most paternalistic, most elegant, for lack of better words, WASPy firms in America. Time Inc. It had aspired to great things. It wasn't just about making money, God forbid. It was about something much more important than that. And even after the merger with Warner, which had taken place in 1990 and at the time had sort of shaken up the old fashioned Time Inc. And made it much more Hollywood and fast moving, nevertheless, at the time of the AOL merger, Time Warner was the world's biggest and most powerful media and entertainment company. This is no joke. In a time when these companies really mattered.

[David Brown]

We've discussed earlier why Steve Case felt it important to connect with Time Warner, given Time Warner's position at that time. What was the thinking in Jerry Levin's office about why Time Warner needed aol, especially given all the question marks about where this Internet revolution was going to go?

[Nina Monk]

That's such an important question because on the face of it, you would have thought that Time Warner, as the world's largest media and entertainment company kind of didn't really need to do a whole lot right. We've got these magnificent assets. Warner Brothers Picture Company, Warner Music Group. We've got the most important consumer magazines, Life magazines, Sports Illustrated, Fortune with these great histories. We've also got Time Warner Cable, the country's second largest cable system. Warner Books, cable networks like CNN and hbo. They even owned a baseball team.

[David Brown]

The Braves you're talking about. Yeah.

[Nina Monk]

But what became increasingly clear by the late 1990s was that it was over if you were not an Internet company, or at least that's what it felt like at that moment. And you have to understand that following the merger in 1990 with Warner, this is Time Inc's merger with Warner, the company had been saddled with an enormous amount of debt. Debt, enormous amount of debt. And Jerry Levin running this company by the mid-1990s was in a panic. Time Warner was actually in free fall. It was losing money. The stock price was going nowhere. There were rumors of takeover attempts because in large part the company's overwhelming debt had reached this obscene sum of $15 billion. And the new York Post used to print this daily geri o meter that gauged Jerry Levin's chances of being fired that day. And that's how precarious his position was. So they needed a catalyst. And the only catalyst that in a short period could completely alter the growth rate of a company like Time Warner was an Internet company. And you had no choice anymore. Jerry Levin's back, he felt, was up against the wall. And every day that he paused, that he hesitated, that he thought more about it, AOL's stock price went up higher and higher and higher, and AOL was worth more and more even while Time Warner was worth less and less. And in the end, Jerry Lebin, and he said exactly this to me. I had no choice. I had to do a transformative transaction.

[David Brown]

Even if it was clear, well, certainly in retrospect, that he didn't know what he was getting himself into. He felt he had to do this.

[Nina Monk]

I think Jerry Levin was sufficiently arrogant or sufficiently lacking in humility as far as anyone who ever worked with him or knew him would acknowledge, would recognize that. There was no doubt in Jerry Levin's mind that this deal was going to be brilliant. There was no doubt in his mind that he and Steve Case were soulmates. There was no doubt in his mind that this merger made perfect sense. Not for a moment did Jerry Levin think this was a bubble. I think he genuinely. I suspect AOL feared that their stock was a bubble. But I think Jerry Levin was as sold on this stuff as anyone. He believed this was the right thing for his company.

[David Brown]

Let's move from the big announcement to when it begins to fall apart. What were the signs that all was not well in Paradise City here? Could you see him on the outside? Were the cracks visible?

[Nina Monk]

It's a good question. I mean, I think it happened almost immediately. The deal was announced on January 10, which was a Monday. Jerry Levin and Steve Case had only agreed on Thursday evening, January 6th, to do this deal. They basically called their bankers, their lawyers that night. Late at night, these guys are pulled out of bed. All of the top lieutenants here, their top bankers, the top lawyers, and they're given instructions that they have three days to pull off this deal. Three days. And from Friday, January 7th, to Monday morning, January 10th, there were 50 plus Time Warner executives, bankers, lawyers, accountants. They worked around the clock. Across town, AOL set up shop on the top two floors of their law firm's offices. Both the companies were given code names because they were trying to prevent leaks. Black for aol, Blue for Time Warner. There is no way. There is no way on earth that you can do proper due diligence for a deal of this size in three days. There's no way. It goes on and on and on. There's just no way. And already during these meetings, because the AOL folks, executives and the Time Warner executives, they hated each other immediately. Every story I heard was the Time Warner guys calling the AOL guys sloppy cowboys, abusive sons of, and much worse. And all I heard from the AOL guys was, what uptight pricks the Time Warner guys were. How snooty and how slow moving and what a bunch of dinosaurs they were and how clueless they were. I've never seen two groups of executives who despised each other as much as these two.

[David Brown]

It wasn't long before people inside Time Warner began to feel betrayed by Levin. Right.

[Nina Monk]

Well, this in so many ways gets to the crux of the problem, which is that Jerry Levin had not brought in any members of his team. He hadn't even tried to sell the deal. They first learn about the deal, basically, at the same time as the media, as the public learns about the deal. And I remember hearing stories from guys saying, I had no idea. Like, I was listening. I was in the car going to work, and I heard this on the radio, and I nearly drove the car off the road. And the sense of having been had a knife right, thrown into your back. Practically every AOL executive was being named to the top positions, and almost all of the Time Warner folks were being either pushed, shunted aside or pushed out entirely, with the exception, of course, of Jerry Levin himself.

[David Brown]

When do you think reality began to hit that this merger was not going anywhere?

[Nina Monk]

Quite, quite quickly? The deal was announced the very beginning of 2000, as you know. But already by a few months after that, we began to see a pretty major collapse. People are starting to freak out. By the time you get to middle of October, which is right around the time that AOL and Time Warner are releasing their latest earning reports, the shares of both the companies on the anticipation of bad news fall even more sharply. What I remember distinctly is the folks inside Time Warner, one after another, going to Jerry Levin to say, you know, we should pull out of this deal. This is a shaky deal. The forecasts are looking worse and worse. And Jerry Levin said, absolutely not. And when I interviewed him about it later, he said that it was an overstatement, that nobody had actually advised him to call off the deal. And, you know, he said to me, I would have walked away the deal, but I don't remember people telling me that. Do I know what's truth and what's fiction? No. But I think he believed this was gonna be the defining moment of his life. And at that moment, to change course would have been devastating.

[David Brown]

Looking back, you know, in the tech world, everyone wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. I guess there's something about what drives people to make these bold moves that perhaps will etch their name in history somehow that sort of grabs the imagination and leads to these spectacular meltdowns.

[Nina Monk]

I think you're right. And I think in some ways the poignancy is that the people who most often get hurt in the end is so called Main Street. In the case of the AOL Time Warner catastrophe, $200 million evaporated almost overnight. And overwhelmingly, when the dust settled, it became clear that everyone, from Steve Case on down had unloaded large chunks of the stock. Soon after the deal was announced when things were incredibly buoyant. They had not sat and stuck in there as it went, dropped further and further and further. And the people who got devastated were those who believed most firmly and those, frankly, who had only 401ks that were dependent on these stocks. It's kind of that same story again and again, which is there's a certain number of people at a high enough level who can see more clearly what's going on than the rest of us and they're able to be more nimble and they end up in the scheme of things, relatively unscathed.

[David Brown]

Nina Monk is the author of Fools Rush in Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. Nina, thanks so much for joining us on Business Wars. This has been wonderful.

[Nina Monk]

Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

[Nick Cannon]

Coming up, even though we were feet apart, we were using AIM to literally sort of break through these walls. And my mind just kind of exploded with like, wow, this is the Internet.

[David Brown]

Millennials. Get ready for a blast from the past. We're remembering AOL Instant messenger away messages and all. Stay with us.

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[David Brown]

Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. It's time to settle into some nostalgia, especially for our millennial listeners. Remember AOL Instant messenger or aim? It completely revolutionized the way we communicate and became an instant hit when it launched in 1997. The software, as you may recall, came on a compact disc. Once installed, it opened up users to a whole new world of online chats in real time. And it was especially popular among teens and tweens who turned AIM from a software into a bona fide culture. In 2017, 20 years after its launch, AIM logged off for good. But its legacy lives on with iMessage, Gchat, Slack, WhatsApp and plenty of other similar platforms. But you know, nothing will ever really replace aim. Wired journalist Lauren Good and Michael Colore co host the podcast Uncanny Valley. They jumped on AIM at the very beginning and Lauren's article for Wired. It's time to bring back the AIM Away message. Wax is poetic for a simpler time in our online history. Lauren, Michael, welcome to Business Wars.

[Nick Cannon]

Thanks so much for having us, David.

[David Brown]

Hey, we're gonna play some sounds here and I would love to hear your knee jerk reactions to these. Let's hear them.

[Unknown]

Gone.

[Nick Cannon]

Oh my gosh. I think I just had like a Pavlovian response to that. And then the door swinging open and shut was really the sound of a frantic teenager trying to connect with their friends while their landline Internet connection was unstable. And so it would just log you on and off automatically. Yeah.

[David Brown]

Wow. So let's talk a little bit about the user experience. You run home from school, you get on aim, and it was kind of like, it's what I imagine the malt shop used to be like in the 50s or something. Cause everyone would just pile on to aim.

[Unknown]

You remember that it was the place where people could go and hang out and people would go and flirt and they would go to talk to their friends who had like moved across the country. You know, sort of the lifeline and the common room.

[David Brown]

See, I want to say we gotta address this. I want to say aim. And yet, if you go to YouTube and you watch how people refer to it these days, I don't remember people calling it aim. How do you guys refer to it?

[Unknown]

In my mind, it's aim, but everybody around me calls it aim, So I just swallow my pride and just say aim.

[Nick Cannon]

Oh, Mike. I call it aim, and I think I always have. But I will say that I used to say I am, as a verb, all I am you or I am me. And now that has been completely supplanted by dm. Direct message.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[David Brown]

Do you guys remember your screen names?

[Nick Cannon]

I do remember my screen name, and for OPSEC reasons, I will not be sharing it. But I will say that it was so creative. It was my initials and one of my basketball numbers.

[Nina Monk]

Ah, that's cool.

[Nick Cannon]

I think I know what Mike's was.

[Unknown]

But I still use it. It's snack fight.

[David Brown]

Snack fight.

[Unknown]

I love it.

[Nick Cannon]

He's snack fight everywhere on the Internet.

[Unknown]

I am.

[Nick Cannon]

What was yours, David?

[David Brown]

I've grown to even remember. I was Spaceman Dave. All right. I was Space Man Dave. I'll just ask.

[Nick Cannon]

That is pretty good.

[Unknown]

Was that a nod to Calvin and Hobbs, Spaceman Spliff?

[David Brown]

No, it was a nod to Ace Freely. Hey, for you kiss army members. Yeah, all right. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, but that was it. You sort of tried to interject a little bit of your personality into your. Into your screen name. You know what was funny? I remember people would put in away messages. If they just had to go to the bathroom or, you know, or if. Or if they had to let the dogs in, they would put in an away message and come right back. I sometimes I thought it was oversharing, I guess, at the time, but I really liked how you could sort of put the world on hold that way. You know what I mean?

[Nick Cannon]

Yeah. I think that the away message was something that was born a little bit of necessity. It had a real function, which was that here we are synchronously chatting with each other, which was different from how we had been texting each other in the past. And we had to let the folks around us know, actually, I need to step away for a second. But then, like, with a lot of technology that starts out as pure utility, people got creative with them over time. So I remember. I mean, I'm probably guilty of doing some really cringe emo away messages at one point. Song lyrics, you know, hoping that the person you had a crush on would see them, or if you were in an argument with your best friend, you'd put up something kind of pointed. And that became an entirely new form of communication.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And also the away Message was sacrosanct. Like if somebody said I am not around, then you had to sort of obey that. You couldn't just barge past it and send them a message anyway. And I really like that about it. It was an off switch that actually worked.

[David Brown]

And we should probably step back for just a moment because people who never really experienced AIM are thinking this just sounds like a hobbled version of text messaging today. But there was something about the, the fact that you had to literally sort of sit in front of a computer and usually it was. It was not a laptop, not back in those days you'd have a desktop computer and so you were sort of physically tied to this machine. I mean, it felt a whole lot more intimate and curated than what we typically think of text messag. Either of you want to weigh in on how it differs from text messaging?

[Unknown]

You have to put your mind in a time pre cell phone, really. I mean, if we consider like the mobile revolution happening in the early 2000s, we're talking about the time when AIM was on its rise and everybody was using it, which was the late 1990s and the early 2000s. So most people didn't have cell phones or if they did, they weren't convenient for texting on. And your only methods of electronic communication with people, it was email and message boards for most people. There were some folks who were hip to the earliest form of chatting on the Internet, which was like chat rooms and IRC Internet relay chat. But for most people it was like if you wanted to talk to your friend who was across the country or even across town, you had to pick up the phone and call them or you could send them an email. So all of a sudden when it showed up, AIM gave you an opportunity to chat with people, synchronously chat with people, just like we do now with texting, just like we do now with Slack. And it was a new thing. So it was really novel and it.

[Nick Cannon]

Was super addictive because it was synchronous. You could sit there and chat in real time with somebody who was on your buddy list, which was kind of mind blowing for what it was at the time. And I remember when I first got to college, my dorm mates and I were all separated by these cinder block walls because we were in, you know, each in our own dorm rooms. But we all had aim. And so we would just message each other and say, hey, want to go to the cafeteria for dinner? Hey, do you want to go to the party this weekend? And even though we were, you know, feet apart, we were using Aim to literally sort of break through these walls, you know? And that to me was sort of when I think, like, my mind just kind of exploded with, like, wow, this is the Internet. This is what it means to be online. And it was a sort of perfect cocoon of technology at that time. This was the early 2000s, when things were really just starting to change. The way we did things. Google and Yahoo, and of course, instant messaging.

[David Brown]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

It also came with its own language. You know, there's a whole shorthand now that we all take for granted, like lol, rofl, ttyl. There's all these little.

[David Brown]

I remember. Yeah.

[Unknown]

And emoji reactions. A lot of us encountered emoji for the first time when we clicked on the button inside aol.

[David Brown]

But do you remember what they used to call emojis?

[Nick Cannon]

Emoticon.

[Unknown]

Emoticons. An emoticon is like, is like colon, close parentheses for a smiley face.

[Nick Cannon]

Yeah, right, yeah.

[Unknown]

But an emoji is like the actual graphical, like the cartoonish.

[Nick Cannon]

Right.

[David Brown]

Lauren, what was the case that you were making for bringing back the away message? I mean, how serious are you about bringing back the away message?

[Nick Cannon]

I think my article in Wired about bringing back the away message was mostly wistful because I realized that the way we communicate today and the technology that we use today to message each other just away messages are not applicable to it because of the difference between synchronous and asynchronous messaging. Away message was really just sort of a special thing for that special moment in time. An AOL instant messenger. Since then, we have seen makers of different applications try to replicate that, whether that's do not disturb mode on your phone or whether it's away messages in Microsoft Teams or Slack. But it's just not the same because I think people tend to see those as, oh, this person is busy right now. They don't want to be disturbed, but I can still message them. And they will just see it when they see it. People don't actually see it as. Maybe I should hold off on messaging entirely because we all have this kind of limited number of bandwidth and it's not normalized to just spam someone with messages even when they're busy. And so we've shifted totally away from this era of, like, there are guardrails around how available or accessible we are to. We're just kind of available all the time. I sort of liken the slack away messages or do not disturb mode on your phone to, like, the squishy orange cones that a teenager is driving around in driver Z. Theoretically, they're there, but you just sort of roll over them because we're all still learning how to best communicate with each other.

[David Brown]

Is it fair to say AIM sort of paved the way for us to experience texting the way we do today, even though obviously it was different because of the guardrails that were there that Lauren was referring to?

[Unknown]

Yeah. So I'm a little bit older in that. When AIM launched, I was already in the workforce. I had a desk job in Southern California, and we used it in the office. Like, we all signed up, and everybody in my department was talking to each other in real time on aim, on our work computers. And our bosses were like, this is total chaos. But for us, it actually helped. Right. It was a productivity tool sometimes. Most of the time, it was a gigantic time waster, but sometimes it was a productivity tool. But, you know, it's kind of wild to think about that. The fact that now, like, instant communication and particularly like group messaging and direct messaging in the workplace is, like, absolutely critical to so many companies.

[David Brown]

If you're looking at it as a kind of a grandfather technology, the closest thing we have to it today that's widely used might be what, Slack, maybe.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Or Microsoft Teams.

[Nick Cannon]

Really? Yeah. I think it's safe to say that Slack is the direct descendant of AOL Instant Messenger.

[Unknown]

Yeah. But, David, you know, I don't want to just steamroll over your idea that it gave us the precursor to texting, because I really do think that it did. Because when smartphones came around and, you know, you had an actual keyboard that you could type messages to each other, it felt familiar because of aim. It wasn't something that was alien that you had to sort of wrap your head around. It was something that you kind of were like, all right, I know this. I've been doing this for years.

[David Brown]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised, as I think about it, that AIM lasted as long as it did on one level. I mean, it went on until 2017. That's when they logged out for the last time. What do you think really brought it down? Was it the smartphone and texting? Because it does seem like it was a distinct enough thing that as a kind of communications mode that it could have survived. Or maybe. Maybe nostalgia is putting too much of a rose tint on my sunglasses here. I mean, what brought down AIM and why? I mean, some people would say, why did it take so long?

[Nick Cannon]

I think that the reason why, from a cultural or technological perspective, AIM lost its relevance is just because there were so many other apps that came up in messaging that were really, really popular and basically supplanted it.

[Unknown]

Yeah, for me it was gchat gtalk in Gmail. All of a sudden your Gmail inbox had aim.

[Nick Cannon]

I still think that what it offered was valuable and is in many ways still valuable today. It just comes in different containers now.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And when you talk about social apps, every social media platform has direct message chat in it now. That's just the way of the world. Right. So Ames DNA really just lives on in a million products.

[David Brown]

Alas, mom is telling me I'm going to have to log off guys, so maybe we should all construct our own away messages here. Lauren, what would you like to say.

[Nick Cannon]

As we wrap up? Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.

[Unknown]

Michael topped that ttyl slamming door sound.

[David Brown]

Love it. Lauren Good is a senior writer at Wired. Michael Colore is WIRED's director of consumer Tech and Culture. You can catch him weekly on the Wired podcast, Uncanny Valley, wherever you listen. Lorne. Michael, thanks so much for watching joining us.

[Nick Cannon]

Thank you so much guys. That was fun.

[David Brown]

Coming up on Business Wars. Southwest is pushed to change just about everything. If it doesn't want to get stuck in the middle, the question is, will passengers go along for that ride? From Wondery, this is episode four of the AOL Time Warner disaster for Business Wars. I'm your host David Brown. Kelly Kyle produced this episode. Peter A.R. cooney is our senior interview producer. Our producers are Tristan Donovan of Yellow Ant and Kate Young. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock. Our senior managing producer is Callum Plews. Our senior producers are Emily Frost and Dave Schilling. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louie. For Wondering.

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