Richard Siklos has this somewhat contrarian piece in today’s New York Times about AOL and whether Time Warner’s former problem child, which seemed to outgrow its issues in the Microsoft-Yahoo-Google bidding for AOL’s search business, can be rehabilitated.
Siklos polled Wall Street analysts, who said, in a word, no:
But even if AOL manages to surprise Wall Street this week by doing better than analysts expect, it will remain the gilded punching bag of the so-called Internet age. There are several reasons for this, and all appear to stem from one fundamental problem beyond expected declines in revenue, earnings and subscribers: AOL’s inability to attract its share of the best talent in its industry, and hence to demonstrate that it has the technological chops to compete with its fiercest rivals.
The funny thing is, so many people are banking on AOL’s widely anticipated launch of its social networking service, AIM Pages, to save the day at the former dot-com-era superstar.
AIM Pages is especially crucial because AIM is the closest thing that AOL has to what used to be called a killer app; it enjoys a wide margin in the United States over its rivals from Yahoo and MSN in both the number of users and the time spent instant-messaging. The problem is, AIM’s numbers have been sliding of late, in direct correlation to the growing amount of time that young people in particular are spending on social-networking sites like MySpace.
Is it me, or is AIM Pages a day-late and a dollar-short? As Siklos notes, AIM itself is on the downswing, losing customers just like its parent service? Pegging a growth product to a service that is in decline just doesn’t make sense.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:14 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
