The ghost of AOL will haunt the Time Warner-AT&T deal

In the end, I guess you could finally say Steve Case was right. Case led AOL to great power in the 1990s, and he then presided over what has become known as one of the worst mergers of all time, when he combined his high-flying Internet giant with Time Warner, back at the turn of the century. It was a truly epic move, all predicated on the very big idea that distribution and content had to marry in the digital age and that whoever did that successfully would rule the next era of media and more. It was also an epic failure, brought down by a toxic combination of timing and execution.
Which is to say that the body of Time Warner — made up of the mandarins of media whose power was waning, although they did not know it at the time — rejected the deal almost immediately and made sure it would never succeed, even as the fast-and-loose slicksters of AOL did everything possible to seem as lightweight as they still were at the time. You could write books on what went wrong — and I did — which raises the question of what Time Warner now thinks will go right in the deal it just struck with telecom giant AT&T to be taken out for $85 billion. As expected, the media has gone wild, dragged along breathlessly as they are for any holy-god deal, nearly forgetting that some of its current principals were the very same people who had been the biggest critics of the match-up of Time Warner and AOL.