There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future by Kara Swisher

Author:Kara Swisher [Swisher, Kara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Industries, Media & Communications, Social Science, Media Studies, Economic History
ISBN: 9781400053070
Google: VKV2CaCX0PYC
Amazon: B000FBJCOO
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2003-10-13T21:00:00+00:00

So we knew it was going to happen, and it did. The Black Horsemen came and cut down the revelers, even those with names of virtue engendered like Prudent and Faithful and American and Growth. . . . Not only did the market go down, it kept going down. . . . Another day it would come back, but not until an unscarred generation, so bold with memories, had become scarred like its predecessor.

ADAM SMITH, The Money Game

Chapter Five

PURSUING THE PUTZ

Was it: “We are, you putz”?

Or was it: “Putz, we are”?

This subtle distinction has taken up more minutes of my life than it ever should have. Starting out, the only things I knew for certain were three basic facts.

The first: That this was a colorful riposte supposedly uttered by AOL’s top deal maker, David Colburn, to a Time Warner counterpart during the weekend of due diligence that was conducted in advance of the consummation of the biggest merger of all time. “You’re making it sound as if you’re buying us,” the Time Warner exec had joked to Colburn, who had actually held his tongue. But with AOL colleagues later, the eternal bad boy had quickly dropped all pretenses, and made the remark. Definitely not hewing to the laughable “merger of equals” party line put out by the deal’s architects, Colburn’s quip offered his own brass-knuckles take on the situation.

Second: That T-shirts were made, white with a blue logo, with this very phrase on them—“Putz, we are,” as it turned out—and given later to Colburn’s notorious Business Affairs team. There was a generous amount of chortling over the shirts, which expressed, to the group’s admiration, Colburn’s screw-you toughness against the Time Warner empire that AOL had just conquered.

And third: That putz is vulgar Yiddish slang for a penis.

I also know for certain that this is not a good story to begin the relationship of AOL and Time Warner. But the “putz” incident took on a life of its own soon after the deal was consummated and became a corporate urban legend, with multiple, and often incorrect, versions bandied about. But like any good urban legend, it owed its existence to some very real problems—ones that were apparent right from the beginning of the AOL Time Warner merger.

The heart of the problem was this: That even if the most basic idea underlying the combination of AOL and Time Warner—the premise that there will and should be an eventual and inevitable convergence of all media and digital products—is a valid one, this particular marriage seemed doomed from the start. Today, that’s easy enough to see and to say, as people pick apart the merger much as you would the breakup of a couple you predicted were headed for divorce court even before the wedding banquet’s appetizer course.

As with any ultimately doomed union, if you slowly wind the merger backward from its messy end to its promising beginnings, you can more easily see how the meltdown happened. From its faulty conception to its deeply

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