“Having tumbled from a high of $56.60, the price of AOL Time Warner’s widely held stock stood at $14.81 at the end of last week, representing an almost $200 billion collapse of shareholder wealth. “As the Internet bubble burst and advertising slid into recession, the company’s executives were slow to adjust their lavish profit-growth promises to Wall Street, which struck back hard,” TIME reported. The following year, Case-who had already taken a diminished role in order to spend time with an ill family member-resigned. “The much ballyhooed broadband move–in which networked homes will enjoy high-speed connections to movies and music whenever they want–is off to a rocky start.” “Despite its powerful brand and unrivaled global member base of 34 million, the AOL division has seen its once stratospheric subscriber growth slow, its ad revenue fall and its international operations bleed money,” TIME reported. The company merged with Time Warner (then the parent company of TIME), and executives of the combined firm announced that they expected AOL Time Warner to grow 33% in the next year.īy 2002, it was clear such grand predictions were unrealistic. Still, it was, TIME noted, “a novel problem-too many customers,” and the company continued to grow.īy 2000, AOL was the nation’s biggest Internet provider and worth $125 billion. Millions of people are using worldwide to generate ideas, map out. The company faced more pushback from users when they switched from an hourly to a monthly pricing plan and launched a major membership drive that led to a traffic surge that couldn’t be handled by AOL’s existing modems. Easily create colorful mind maps to print or share with others. The backlash was echoed the following year when AOL picked up Netscape. In 1997, AOL announced they’d acquired CompuServe, riling many loyal CompuServe users. “But the annual hazing given clueless freshmen pales beside the welcome America Online users received last March, when the Vienna, Virginia-based company opened the doors of the Internet to nearly 1 million customers,” TIME reported.īy the time AOL went public, the service had fewer than 200,000 subscribers, but TIME later reported that number soon climbed. Users were used to dealing with “newbies” in the fall, as freshman acclimated to protocol, but now there were new users flooding in every day. Those moves led to some backlash-which soon became a recurring theme for the company.Īt that time, one of the biggest sources of tension was that the Internet had previously been available mostly for people affiliated with colleges and universities.
By 1993, AOL introduced its own email addresses, a Windows version and access to the rest of the Internet for its users. In 1991, Quantum was renamed America Online.