I'm John Batchew with my good colleague, Simon Constable, writing for the Wall Street Journal,

a flashback to AOL Time Warner merger.

What happens, Simon?

We have a couple of minutes.

This is really amazing.

AOL was the company that one of the big companies that brought the web to the world by sending people discs in the mail, whether they wanted them or not, so that they could log onto the internet.

They did very well at doing that, and they did so well they had enough money to buy Time Warner.

Time Warner, a very longstanding organization to do with creation.

And the two did not mix in any way.

And it ended up with a merger costing.

They lost $100 million, sorry, $100 billion.

It's an enormous amount of money that they lost.

And then eventually AOL was kicked

off the of the nameplate of it. But it was really interesting. Culture matters when you have a

company. And if the cultures clash, it can be a disaster and it really was a disaster.

A Time Warner was a content company eventually and is now quite extant as a content maker.

AOL has completely disappeared from everybody, but a few emails I see still have a.org

address.

It was a dial-up, Simon.

25 years ago, that was the only way you could get on the internet. And that's why they sent

you the disc. So you could download the software, plug in your phone to your computer when they

had those sort of things. And you could do that. And that was the only way. And it was radical at the

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