They say hindsight is 20-20, but former AOL executive Tom Grubisich says AOL's painful move from the top to the middle came long before its merger with Time Warner. In 1997 AOL founder Steve Case was
so obsessed with growing AOL's subscriber base (which then represented about a third of all Internet users) that he neglected to focus on the thing that would ultimately make the Web the profitable
place it is today: content. Years later, following a failed marriage to Time Warner, massive subscriber losses, and a distant fourth place position in revenues behind Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's
MSN, AOL is now trying to play catch-up. Grubisich blames Case for AOL's languishing position, saying essentially that it was Case himself who AOL needed to be liberated from, not Time Warner.
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