hmmm. I'm not surprised but I don't know if it's good or bad at this point. it was his influence that drove AOL down the 'advertising is everything' dead end that they're struggling out of and he was a weasel who refused to hear about the failure to get resources where they were needed, but he built AOL in the first place. In terms of running the merged company, it may mean that TW never gets the Internet thing properly; the AOL advantage was that having always succeeded the company was never afraid to do the next thing and that gave it the impetus to push TW forward. And if you wonder why TW needs it, look back at this wonderful article from Wired which has my favourite quote bar *none* on page 4.
"They were in a dark room, feeling their way along the wall," says a former Time Inc. executive, "trying to come up with something that sounded credible next to Disney's carefully articulated GO Network plan. But it was Monty Python's Flying Circus. 'Do we want our hub to be a traffic aggregator?' 'What is a traffic aggregator?' 'What's a hub again?' In a room of 30 people, there'd be 27 trying desperately to pretend they understood what was going on and 3 banging their heads on the table, crying, 'Oh God, please make this stop!'"