AOL now on SALE, but which company should buy it? (Part 1)

Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:34 pm. 1 comment
Posted in AOL.

Time Warner is now deciding what it should do with its AOL venture. Now its time for the fun part. Who should buy AOL? Well lets take a look at each and every company suggested by various users around the internet. This will be split into 3 parts, adding new companies as we go along. 

Time Warner has decided that AOL should be split into two. One part deals mainly with advertising aspects, and the other dealing with community.  

Goal: To keep the AOL + AIM community together as it once was.

The Obvious

AOL + Google

Well personally, I like this idea only because of how Google treats its members. They take a very minimalist approach resulting in less flashy ads and faster loading times. AOL members have been pleading for less ads, but their wishes were never granted.

However, even if we take away those crazy ads, AOL (paying) members do not like change. It pretty much boggles my mind of how they want things to stay the same like it did from 10 years ago. If you change one thing they go crazy and start complaining. As long as Google provide some sort of blog that can address community issues, things might work out  more smoothlyfor them.

Google’s approach may not fare so well with AIM. AIM’s business relies on teens, glitter, and glam. So we’d hope for Google be consistent with AIM’s visual design and services.

AOL + Microsoft

Microsoft may do well with AIM members but not so much with AOL members. Microsoft is big on advertising so I would expect to see pretty much no changes in any of the websites AOL owns. AOL (paying) members love guidance and tech support, and Microsoft stance on this has been pretty lapse. Microsoft does work very well with troubleshooting on message boards, so hopefully problems can get sorted out there.

This seems to be the most obvious choice to keep everything running the same way. In fact I prefer this over Microsoft + Yahoo. Google’s reaction towards this would be very interesting. Google and AOL have done some minor cooperative efforts this past year, hopefully they won’t totally cut themselves off from each other.

AOL + Yahoo

I can definitely see Yahoo converting AOL members over to its own platform, which pretty much kills everything. So I’m not entirely liking this prospect at all, unless it becomes Microsoft + AOL + Yahoo. I don’t think Yahoo is mature enough at this point in time to handle two conflicting communities concurrently. Maybe this could have worked years ago when Yahoo was all the rage and Google wasn’t even born yet.