It took eight years but it looks like Time Warner is finally undoing the epic mistake that was AOL-Time Warner, and spinning off AOL into an independent company that can fail on its own.

Let us hearken back to a darker time, a time when there was no easy way to access the wild, untamed world of the world wide web, not that there was much to see then but it sure beat the hell out of whatever you were supposed to be doing on the computer. That time was 1990-something, and if you weren’t a giant nerd and you were on the internet, you were on AOL. AOL worked back then, because seriously, getting on the internet was hard back in the day. And once you got on the internet, how did you know where to go? Yahoo only existed as a slow index on a server at Stanford, Google wasn’t even yet a glimmer in anyone’s eye, and so pretty much the first thing you did was fire up Netscape 1.0 and go directly to www.playboy.com until a teacher came into the computer lab and you alt-tabbed back to your Word document, but it didn’t matter because God knows you got tired of waiting for the porn to arrive on your screen one agonizing line at a time. AOL was your hookup, with their keywords and such, or their chatrooms where you could talk to all the balding men pretending to be hot teenage girls that you could ever dream of.  ASL? LOL!

But then broadband happened. Okay, it wasn’t that fast, broadband happened a good fifteen years later, and why would anyone want to keep paying $20 a month for stupid dial-up when they could pay that same price and get fast internet, and not be reminded of the Ryan-Hanks romance that should have been every time they received new spam? Yeah, that’s right, today is all Tom Hanks, all the time. Anyway, AOL didn’t do the smart thing and just die already, it…stuck around to provide the same hand-holding interface to the internet that everyone stopped needing five years ago, owns the Netscape browser that no one uses anymore, bought advertising.com whose name is forever tainted by adware, launched an online TV service (that failed), oh, and owns TMZ.com, contributing to the general dumbing-down of modern society.  

One final tidbit to keep in mind, remember that AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around. Not six years later, Time Warner dropped AOL from its name.  This is like if Little Orphan Annie disowned Daddy Warbucks because he shamed her so badly that not even his billions of dollars could win her loyalty. This is the company that’s going to be spun off into its own concern. Can’t wait.