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by adestefan 5542 days ago
The face palms started with the AOL/Time Warner fiasco in 2000.

I still remember sitting in my basement watching the NASDAQ hit 5000 and thinking this wasn't going to end well. The AOL/Time Warner merger a month later didn't help that feeling. Too bad I was a poor 19 year old college student who didn't understand how the financial world works at the time.
1 comments
pbiggar 5541 days ago
The merger was sheer brialliance on the part of AOL. Aware of how completely overvalued they were, they "merged" (aka bought) Time Warner for pennies on the dollar of real value. Then when the dot-com bubble burst, they didn't get completely hosed as their share price dropped to nothing, which is what happened to everyone else.

(note: I'm not sure of my history here, so please feel free to correct me if you know better)

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adestefan 5541 days ago
At the time AOL really thought they were going to be the savior of traditional media. The sky was the limit and they were no where near the top. The next place everyone would go to get their news, entertainment, and world information would be "web portals." The idea was to cram as much stuff as possible on your homepage were people could see everything and amazed at the sheer amount of information. AOL did it, Netscape did it, Yahoo did it , etc.
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