Happy AOL-Time Warner Split Day

AOL's new brand, renderered "Aol.", is supposed to conjur up images of dotcom names. Get it?

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In January 2000, Michael Kinsley wrote a funny little essay for Time magazine headlined AOL-Time Warner Merger: Six Degrees of America Online in which he declared, "This is the make-it-or-break-it millennium for AOL Time Warner. By the year 3000, or maybe even sooner, we will have answers to the questions that plague us this week, such as, Can we talk about something else, please?"

That was when the marriage of AOL and Time Warner was still so fresh, so new. Headlines like AOL-Time Warner Isn't So Scary (the New York Times) and AOL-Time Warner: We'll Be Nice (Wired News) were everywhere and it was understandable that Kinsley and others would imagine the company existing for centuries, a kind of Pax AOL-Time Warner, or (to echo Francis Fukuyama's famous formulation) the end of media history.

Alas, today, that marriage officially ended.

In preparation for the split, AOL's been sprucing itself up: In November, the company altered its name to Aol. (period included) and launched an aggressive rebranding effort.

Analysts quoted by Bloomberg's Sarah Rabil are entirely not optimistic about the newly independent AOL, predicting that (in Rabil's words), "AOL Inc. may report declining profit for years after its spinoff from Time Warner Inc."

Rabil quotes AOL's still somewhat new CEO Tim Armstrong (late of Google, he still has at that new CEO smell), who puts a positive spin on his company's prospects: "We are standing in front of the next 50- or 100-billion- dollar shift in media online over the next decade…It comes down to execution, execution, execution."

Presumably he's not talking about the 2,500 person reduction of his staff that was announced last month and is going forward now, but rather the creation of Seed, a new publishing system that will rely heavily on Web-search trends. It's really all in how you look at that word "execution."

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