AOL spinoff?

[Dr Mordrid]

Stephen Case, who helped mastermind AOL's record-breaking acquisition of Time Warner, has begun to talk about the possibly of undoing the deal and spinning off AOL, according to two senior company executives who have spoken with him.

http://www.iht.com/articles/97554.html

About freakin' time Time Warner got rid of that chain around their neck

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

Genious business tactics! First, let's do an expensive and senseless merge, then, an expensive spinoff to form two separate companies again. I applaud their intelligence!

AZ

[drslump]

while they merge and undo the merge some few people will be engrossing their bank accounts while the little share holders will not see a penny from this.
As my statistics teacher used to tell "money needs to be moved to grow". He was a freak so that's the only I remember from him and I don't quite understand it

ciao, Ivan

[GuchiGuh]

American Business Phylosophy?

[Dr Mordrid]

The American business philosophy is often called "Grow Or Die"; aka GOD.

The GOD premise is that in business the failure to grow is equivalent to an organism dying; meaning that breaking even in any given year is losing money because of inflation and other factors.

Most businesses fail to grow because they either fail to plan, their plans are poorly thought out or fail to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly; they fail to assign accountabilities for growth and within the company itself.

The problem is that the AOL-Time Warner merger was a perversion of this idea in that from the get-go even the most agressive business leaders and analysts saw that their merger made no sense (bad mix & financials) and that accountability was likely to be a rare commodity given the egos involved.

This has been proven absolutely true since the merger was finalized, so IMO a split back to the former state is just a recognition of financial reality and common sense.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

What I was trying to say is they shouldn't even have merged in the first place - we had a nice word for the merger craziness here.. Fusionitis (fusion=merger).

AZ

[Greebe]

We had Fusionitis hit the US back in the '80's, Chicken McNugget anyone?

[Dr Mordrid]

Can't help but remember the movie "Demolition Man" where all the restaurants had been gobbled up in mergers & everything was a Taco Bell

Dr. Mordrid

[Wulfman]

The American business philosophy is often called "Grow Or Die"; aka GOD.

The GOD premise is that in business the failure to grow is equivalent to an organism dying; meaning that breaking even in any given year is losing money because of inflation and other factors.

Most businesses fail to grow because they either fail to plan, their plans are poorly thought out or fail to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly; they fail to assign accountabilities for growth and within the company itself.

now I'm interested in your opinion: why do we measure growth regarding companies (or the whole economy of a nation) in "more percent than the year before"? why not use a linear approach instead of this "exponential" one?
growing gets harder from year to year...

going a bit off-topic here...

mfg
wulfman