Stealing Time : Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner

Rating:
Summary: Excellent tour through the AOL Time Warner disaster
Review: This is a terrific new book by a Washington Post reporter who followed AOL for the newspaper through its ups, its way ups, its downs and its way downs (now). The most appealing part of the book is that the subject is approached without malice. Klein could have taken a muckraking, expose the crooks attitude, but he did not. Perhaps this is because he spent so much time with "the boys at AOL" during the time he covered them for the Post.
The book appears to be very thoroughly documented and balanced. In the end, however, we are left with one, strong conclusion: AOL cooked the books to get the merger done with Time Warner and continued to cook them as long as possible to keep the numbers up after the merger. They did so, as has been documented previously, by booking phony ad sales when money flowed both ways and counting as revenue money that had not yet arrived.
It is clear, from this book and other reporting, that AOL should never have taken over Time Warner, any more than a mouse should try to eat an elephant. AOL was flying high on the combination of its subscriber revenues, temporarily inflated ad revenues and, more importantly, the expectations of investors that the Internet had no known limits (it did). Most of this had to be known Steve Case and his high spending, high flying group at AOL. They went ahead with the merger anyway, at all costs. Turns out, they lost their jobs and, for many of them, their fortunes.
There is no doubt that a kind of stock and money madness enveloped AOL. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect, for some, will be the revelations about how much money was wasted both by AOL and its stock optioned employees on their own. While the record is shocking, I have a feeling that Klien barely scratched the surface in this regard.
This book should be interesting to anyone who follows American business, who invested in tech stocks during the gold rush and anyone else who simply wants to learn about human nature and money. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The mother of all culture clashes
Review: This is an excellent book on a variety of scores.

It is eminantly readable and well written--informative and entertaining and very difficult to put down.

It describes the economies and cultures of two very different companies. AOL, a new breed upstart with a strong central management focus--with a desire to get into 'media content' to feed it's distribution focus, and Time Warner, a staid veteran with decentralized units,--with a desire to get into 'internet distribution' to supply it's 'media content' These mutual needs led both companinies to overlook the obvious faults of the other, and the vast culural gaps between the two.

AOL comes off more poorly than Time Warner, mostly due to it's over the top 'dot.com' management and financial chicanery, but in truth AOL was operating in a persmissive environment and did little that was frankly 'illegal', although a lot that was unethical. Time Warner was the dupe, and as such they are as much to blame. It's CEO worked toward a desire to participate in the internet age without involving his board or other company insiders, and not really understanding the way AOL took advantage of T-W's need to get into 'cyberspace' at almost any cost.

Part of the fascinating story is the way AOL frantically used increasingly dicey techniques to keep their earnings and stock price up before the merger. so that Time Warner wouldn't catch on to the the marginal value that AOL really held for them.

Another interesting part is the description of the phenomenal cultural divide that destroyed any chance the companies could pull off any of the touted synergies, or similar catch phrases that now mark the burial grounds of the dot.com era.

The book also is very good at describing the melt down that eventually took place when earnings and synergies and hopes could no longer be kept artificially afloat.

The character sketches of the leading players are riveting, and are skillfully done by the author to provide a basis for understanding the agendas and goals of each person involved in this whole convulted mess.

As I finished the book my reaction was that AOL was a fast talking sharpie that took advantage of an incredibly naive Time Warner. It was less a steal than a well done con.