America Online

APPLE COMPUTER Inc.'s on-line information service, eWorld, is eVaporating, and by the end of the month will be eXtinct. Apple says it will shut down eWorld March 31 and refocus its attention on the Internet's World Wide Web.Even so, Apple does not want to be known as the company that created 147,000 homeless people in cyberspace. It is encouraging eWorld refugees to migrate to America Online; AOL software will be bundled with most new Macintosh computers, and AOL will develop new software and services especially for Mac users.

My wife and I rarely fight about money. She's understanding about my modest technology expenditures, and I'm so glad that she's willing to manage the finances that it would never occur to me to question anything she spends. But for the past year, this good woman has been on the warpath about one recurring expense. "When are you going to get rid of that AOL account?" she asks. "It's not like you use the thing. What do we pay Comcast all that money for? Sometimes I think we sign over our whole paychecks to Comcast, and you still want to pay AOL?

The first big shock of the Los Angeles earthquake had hardly subsided when thousands of computer users in California and across the nation dialed up their on-line services, looking for news and trying to make contact with relatives and friends.With regular long-distance voice lines blocked or curtailed, the on-line services -- with their own transcontinental networks -- became a conduit for Californians trying to tell outsiders that they were OK, and for families elsewhere trying to make contact with people in the earthquake zone.

The question nagged Harvey Levin all summer: Is the Internet a place where TV careers go to die -- or be reborn? After Telepictures Productions pulled the plug on Levin's syndicated newsmagazine Celebrity Justice, he was approached about starting an entertainment news Web site with America Online. "My initial reaction was, I couldn't be less interested," Levin recalled. "I thought, I'm going to do more television. Why would I do Internet?" But he continued to ponder the benefits of online distribution: younger viewers, faster turnaround, lower overhead, not to mention exposure to the more than 110 million people who visit AOL Web sites each month.

America Online's stock slumped last week after the company's latest warning that other online services and direct Internet access providers could spell tougher competition in the future. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL reiterated comments it made to analysts last quarter, warning of potentially high "churn" rates -- the rate at which new customers join and leave the service -- lower subscriber rates and higher expenses. Indeed, the company announced plans to spend more than $100 million in a new marketing campaign targeted at computer owners who are not current AOL members.

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA -- As Rod Serling might say, imagine this...You are an executive of America Online Inc. You have called a press briefing to show reporters the data network center from which you fought your company's world-famous, worldwide Aug. computer crash. You are seeking to convince the assembled scribes that the event was an aberration, that the world's biggest online service is actually quite reliable and getting better.And the reporters, all but the one from Business Week, are late.

NEW YORK - AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit will sell businesses a more-secure version of its instant-messaging software as the largest Internet company tries to find more corporate customers. America Online plans to charge companies for each employee who uses an "enterprise" edition of the service to trade quick, conversational messages, Senior Vice President Bruce Stewart said in an interview yesterday. He declined to discuss prices. The consumer version, used by 180 million subscribers, remains free.

DULLES, Va. -- America Online Inc. said yesterday that it is considering charging extra fees for certain exclusive services such as games, as the No. 1 online service looks for ways to bolster revenue.The company declined to comment on how much extra it would charge.AOL this month introduced a $19.95 flat fee for unlimited monthly use to compete with rivals including Microsoft Corp.'s online service and AT&T Corp.'s Internet-access service.That means AOL must rely more on other revenue sources, such as advertising, electronic transactions, and possibly premium services.

America Online Inc. had egg on its face yesterday, as the world's leading online service saw its worldwide system crash for at least 14 hours after a routine software upgrade went awry.The outage began about 4 a.m., a time Dulles, Va.-based AOL chose to install new software during scheduled maintenance because relatively few of its 6.2 million subscribers are online. But it lasted throughout the day and into the evening."If it isn't fixed by [last] night, there's going to be hell to pay over there," said Mark Mooradian, senior analyst at the New York-based Internet consulting firm Jupiter Communications.

America Online Inc. said yesterday that it has become the world's first online service to surpass $1 billion in annual sales, as the company reported earnings above Wall Street estimates the day after a worldwide service outage sent 6 million of its customers back to phones, faxes and snail mail for a day.AOL said its sales for the year ended June 30 were almost $1.1 billion, nearly triple its fiscal 1995 sales of $394.3 million. And its reported fourth-quarter profits were $21 million, or 19 cents a share, beating estimates that, on average, said the company would earn 17 cents.

"Three years ago my brother died (officially missing, presumed dead - no death certificate)," wrote an anonymous contributor last week at gripe2ed .com, a consumer complaint Web log. "At that time I was able to cancel his credit card, gas, insurance - everything except his AOL account." It seems that America Online Inc., not entirely irrationally, needed a screen name and other account information to cancel the subscription - something this consumer, under the circumstances, did not have handy.

NEW YORK - Time Warner Inc. said yesterday that it would pay $2.4 billion to settle a shareholder lawsuit over alleged improper accounting stemming from its merger with America Online Inc. The world's largest media company is placing the money in reserve, along with another $600 million to cover related settlements. The announcement came as Time Warner reported a loss for the second quarter because of the tentative settlement. "By acting now to put these matters behind us, we avoid the costs and distractions of protracted litigation, an outcome we clearly believe serves the best interest of our shareholders," Chief Executive Officer Richard D. Parsons said during a conference call.

Time Warner Inc. put the finishing touches yesterday on a $300 million civil settlement with federal regulators over allegations the media giant improperly inflated advertising revenue and subscriber numbers of its America Online unit earlier this decade. The settlement completes a deal, announced in December, in which Time Warner agreed to pay a total of $510 million, including $60 million in penalties to the Justice Department and $150 million to settle civil lawsuits. At that time, the remaining $300 million, to be paid to the Securities and Exchange Commission, was only a tentative agreement.

Time Warner Inc. is expected to announce that it has reached a settlement with the Justice Department in its investigation of advertising transactions between America Online Inc. and smaller Internet companies that allowed America Online to exaggerate its growth. The announcement could come as early as today. The company might also announce that it has reached a tentative agreement with the enforcement division staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is conducting a separate investigation into accounting irregularities at America Online, according to an official close to the case.

We have a lot of America Online e-mail saved on our computer. We want to unload it to a file so that we can access it after we stop subscribing to AOL. Can you suggest a technique or product that will enable us to do that? We use AOL 9.0. After more than a decade of leaving its users unable to transfer their e-mail from its proprietary software, AOL switched gears a couple of months back. America Online now lets its customers read and send AOL e-mail using software like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora.

WASHINGTON - America Online plans to offer some of its music, sports and news on the Internet at no charge. The Time Warner unit is presenting free content, such as a concert by Usher that was available March 23, to encourage sampling. "This will give people on the Web a glimpse of what they would have had access to if they were members," said Jim Bankoff, executive vice president for programming. Putting content on the Web also gives the company greater opportunity for advertising revenue.

Backing down in the face of stiff resistance from Wall Street and concern that the Internet would take over its hold on customers, America Online Inc. yesterday announced deep price cuts and dropped a controversial accounting practice that has helped make the company one of the year's biggest Wall Street losers.The Dulles, Va.-based online service provider also moved to beef up its mix of news, chat and entertainment by naming the founder of the MTV cable television network, Robert Pittman, as head of its new AOL Networks division.

America Online Inc. yesterday unveiled an alliance with one of the largest companies that make "search engines" for using the Internet, a move analysts said is another sign that AOL is abandoning its distinctive strategy for selling computing to the masses in favor of the emerging methods of the Internet.The deal calls for AOL and Excite Inc. to create a new Internet search engine for AOL's 7 million-plus customers, marketed under both companies' names and positioned to make the new engine the primary way AOL subscribers gain access to the Internet.

NEW YORK - Just 980 days after America Online and Time Warner completed a mega-merger whose supercharged promises backfired, the board voted yesterday to remove "AOL" from the corporate name. The media giant said its ticker symbol will revert to TWX on the New York Stock Exchange, where the AOL price is half what it was at the beginning of 2001, before the $112 billion merger. Changing the name, including new signs and logos, should take a few weeks, the company said. After the merger that had been heralded as the perfect combination of old and new media, the company suffered from a surfeit of infighting, a shortfall of synergies among units, a plunge in online ad revenue, a fall-off of AOL subscribers, the ouster of several top executives and two continuing government investigations into accounting irregularities.

"AOL" is all but O-U-T at AOL Time Warner Inc. America Online Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Miller has proposed to corporate Chairman Richard Parsons that the expanded name be shrunk to what it was before the ill-fated megamerger in January 2001. As a result, Parsons and senior managers are considering changing the name to Time Warner, but the decision will be made "in due course with the board," spokeswoman Mia Carbonell said yesterday. The 13-member board, including six members with AOL roots, meets next month and could take up the issue then.