Every promising technology/company that gets gobbled up by the bureaucratic mega fauna enviably end up being re-chewed and strewn about as piles of dung (to be burned to repel mosquitoes).
AOL's problem is that it's a corporation first, a product/service creating, maintaining and selling entity second. Oh sure, the execs may think they're "creating and maintaining" a product/service, but their mindset is "how do we make money out of X"; not "how can we provide the best X we can and make money out of it".
Once any entity defines its existence by finding means of validation for said existence rather than innovation and inspiration, it's doomed to mediocrity and, later, collapse.
Of which I'm sure they were thinking how to make money off of first, not how the hell to increase quality afterwards. Kinda like what happened to Java after being inherited by Oracle when they bought Sun.
Another anecdote: ICQ was the very, or at least one of the first instant messaging applications, and acquired by AOL in the late 90s "for US$287 million in cash up front and $120 million in additional payments over three years"[1]. It was a huge story in Israel at the time. The company is still there, but I don't know a single person who still uses it today.
A couple years ago, AOL sold ICQ to the Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies for around $187.6 mil. I believe it's still popular in Eastern Europe, Russia and a few other areas.
I've literally only met "one" person who still uses ICQ and I have no idea who he talks to on it. He's much older than I am, someone I look up to, but he's also a bit weird.
AOL's problem is that it's a corporation first, a product/service creating, maintaining and selling entity second. Oh sure, the execs may think they're "creating and maintaining" a product/service, but their mindset is "how do we make money out of X"; not "how can we provide the best X we can and make money out of it".
Once any entity defines its existence by finding means of validation for said existence rather than innovation and inspiration, it's doomed to mediocrity and, later, collapse.