Interesting 10 year reflection on AOL/TWX by Gerry Levin and Steve Case. You can enjoy it yourself with the embedded video below from CNBC, but here’s some snippets of interesting quotes and comments:

— “Worst deal of the decade…apparently” (referring to recent NYT article)
— “It’s not a supermarket — it’s a mall” (describing what the Internet business became versus what they had anticipated as a valued walled garden)
— “We’re not a capitalist country anymore” (commenting on how government regulation has taken control of major companies)

  • Mea culpa with comments about needs for compassion and missionary zeal — seemingly at a loss from other people and not themselves — and evidently Levin’s fault that the company didn’t have it. Would that have made a difference? Very interesting rear-view mirror…
  • Compassion and love? Vision and execution. Losing that when they put the companies together. Blaming it today on the baggage, Wall Street, and not innovating for customers. Who was going to innovate and how were they rewarded for it? Not much on too much hype and not enough creating something new.
  • Citing positive examples of Time and Turner integrations — not the best of examples either and the level of friction and loss had been tremendous.
  • “Going to the mountaintop of expectations” and “falling from grace” — strangely self-grandiose, biblical, and not a rolling-up-the-sleeves humility
  • Comparing community of AOL to Twitter…”AOL was the Internet.” Sounded vaguly like “coulda been a contenda.”
  • “I would want to be on the forefront of the media somewhere and not holding the old media bag.”

You’d think that they were reading what I just spent the last week writing…which will show up as excerpts here soon. Happy 2010.

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Augmenting My Mind

How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away? I'm now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I...

From Music in LA to Digital and Music in Austin

We've just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital...

Playing with Facebook Stories Camera Effects

My Facebook friends must be thinking I'm nuts (again).  I've been tinkering with Facebook Stories and its Camera Effects.  In fact, I've been playing so much I'm also looking into the Camera Effects and AR (augmented reality) developer group. First, here's some of the...

Craft, Process, and Thinking of Becoming

Today I'm working on taxes for our two college students' FAFSAs and watching "Abstract: The Art of Design" on Netflix in the background.  Christoph Niemann is both in his story and telling his story about craft and life.  He is a character and an animated...

HUD: Stories on How We Work and Decide

Gigi enjoyed sharing thoughts over YouTube and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Series.  This session was recorded in January and ran as a webinar on March 17.  You can find it now...