• New York Times, Monday, January 11, 2010 2:20 PM

Amid a bloody restructuring effort by the newly independent AOL to cut one-third of its workforce, The New York Times just ran a long piece on the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger. Valued at a still-jaw-dropping $350 billion, it remains the largest merger -- and greater corporate fiasco -- in American business history. So, what happened? For one, a level of grandiosity that most men can only muster at the turn of a century, or at what they perceive to be the end of an era. Also, a gargantuan clash of corporate cultures, or, as The Times puts it, "both sides seemed to hate one another."

Says Richard Parsons, the company's then president: "I remember saying at a vital board meeting where we approved this, that life was going to be different going forward because they're very different cultures, but I have to tell you, I underestimated how different." And the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the fact that AOL was so heavily invested in the dial-up Internet didn't help. Writes The Times: "In May of 2000, the dot-com bubble began to burst and online advertising began to slow, making it difficult for AOL to meet the financial forecasts on which the deal was based ... The world began moving quickly to high-speed Internet access, putting AOL's ubiquitous dial-up service in jeopardy."

Read the whole story at New York Times »