“When Steve Jobs released the first iPhone in June 2007, Apple Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. were worth almost exactly the same in the public markets: About $115 billion,” Dennis K. Berman reports for The Wall Street Journal. “What came over the next eight years was one of the greatest transfers of power and wealth in corporate history. Mobile phone operators — who had been brutish, intractable gatekeepers to the customer — were turned into Apple’s lackeys.”
“Today Apple is worth about $735 billion, nearly double that of Verizon and AT&T Inc. combined,” Berman reports. “The carriers still love to romance the ‘power of the network,’ but this has the feel of a crumbling empire, vainly proclaiming its domain over places long overrun.”
“Neither Verizon nor AT&T is going away. But their place in the world seems ever more insecure. What is their purpose in this converged world? AT&T has taken a path into the past, agreeing to buy satellite-TV operator DirecTV for nearly $50 billion,” Berman reports. “Verizon is spending $4.4 billion on AOL, a loose confederation of advertising-technology businesses, random “content” plays, and a beguiling, money-leaking adventure called the Huffington Post.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Looks like desperation has finally driven Verizon’s powers that be completely nuts.
It is about Verizon feeding ads from AOL’s network to your phone. This, Verizon’s perspective, is called “enhancing the user experience.” This feature will make me instantly switch to Verizon.
How much did Time/Warner pay Steve Case for AOL?
Actually, AOL acquired Time Warner. The combined company was 55 percent owned by AOL stockholders and 45 percent owned by Time Warner stockholders.
Thanks for the correction. Does this mean Verizon owns Time/Warner? Or did they split out the AOL components?
AOL was spun out as a separate company about six years ago. There is no relationship at present between AOL and Time Warner.
Isn’t that f***in’ amazing? The media never could quite wrap their head around the idea, so even today, you’ll still hear it referred to as a “merger”, but no — AOL bought Time-Warner!
Unfortunately, what AOL learned the hard way was that when a smaller (but more valuable) company buys a far bigger company, the people behind the bigger company often still end up running things. And that’s what happened to AOL Time-Warner: the “Time-Warner” side gained control internally, aided by the fact that the AOL business was fading. AOL was spun off, and now it looks as if the “merger” never happened.
But it did. One of the world’s biggest media companies was bought by a company that got rich spamming everyone’s snail-mailboxes with install CDs. That always makes me laugh.
——RM
160 billion
‘If you look at Apple’s DNA, we are not one of the greatest of selling to the fortune 500 and there’s 500 of them, 500 CIOs that are orifices that you have to go through to get to the fortune 500. In the cell phone business there was five. We didn’t even like 500, we rather run an ad for millions of people and let everybody make up their own mind, you can imagine what we thought about five to get to the end-users. So we didn’t think that we were going to be successful in the cell phone business because of the carriers.’
‘Steve Jobs Bio: The Unauthorized Autobiography.’
Poor TW, the AOL acquisition of Time Warner had to be embarrassing. Yes, this was a 15 years ago. But I couldn’t believe some of the prices companies were paying back then before the tech bubble burst. A lot of people made a lot of money back then for vapor companies. Remember when some domains started selling for millions of dollars?
There’s still an AOL?
AOL?? What, were Coleco or Radio Shack not available?
Damn. Didn’t they just buy e-World too?
May AOL be Verizon’s ‘hole into which one throws money’, aka FAILboat, as it was for Time Warner.
yahoo is next
Not sure exactly how this will play out and apparently no one else is either… yes, there’s an AOL.