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AOL Chairman Steve Case: Key Player In The Internet Revolution By Virginie Montet
WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (AFP) - At the age of six, he ran a neighborhood juice stand with his brother, charging two cents a glass with the hope that customers would hand in five cents and ask them to keep the change. Now at 41, Steve Case will become chairman of AOL Time Warner, the media-Internet mammoth to be formed by the merger announced Monday of his group and Time Warner Inc.
Case, the founder and top executive of America Online, the world's biggest Internet company, has been one of the driving forces behind the cyberspace revolution. He is the third of four children and was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 21, 1958. Case's father was a corporate lawyer and his mother an elementary school teacher.
In 1980, he graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with a bachelor's degree in political science. In his experience of his days in Williamstown, Case said, "It was the closest thing to marketing," his real passion. He then joined the marketing division of consumer product giant Procter and Gamble before switching to the Pizza Hut chain, where he was responsible for developing new products.
During his travels, he carried a portable computer to fight boredom and discovered the first online service providers. In 1983, he took up a marketing position with Control Video Corp., a start-up company delivering Atari video games to personal computers. However, that company went bankrupt. Case then founded Quantum Computer Services in 1985, which offered online services for Commodore computers. He also made deals with Apple Computer and Tandy to develop software products.
Quantum was renamed America Online in 1991 and a year later, raised $66 million in capital during its initial public offering on the stock market. As of last week, the value of AOL was estimated at $164 billion, with the merger announced with Time Warner placing the estimated value of the new firm at $350 billion.
However, it was not a smooth road for Case and AOL. As the Internet began to explode, AOL (then a small independent player) trailed far behind its online rivals, including CompuServe and Prodigy. Through an aggressive marketing drive, Case slashed subscription fees and offered AOL CDs for free, a move that immediately lured hundreds of thousands of additional customers.
The company's success was occasionally marred by technical snafus. In 1994 and 1996, customers found themselves unable to log on to the overloaded service during peak hours. AOL, dubbed "America On Hold" by its critics, placated its irate customers by offering them free hours to surf the Internet.
The hard-working Case generally kept a low profile in the media, although he agreed to do an ad for The Gap clothing company. He quickly emerged as a rival to the other key player of the Internet revolution, Microsoft's Bill Gates.
Microsoft had already dominated the personal computer business in 1995. When the multi-million dollar business announced it was launching an online service, it was Case who led efforts to press the U.S. Justice Department to launch an antitrust probe of Microsoft. As Microsoft extended its hold on the market by launching its Internet browser Explorer, AOL struck back by buying Netscape, the market leader. In the most recent business move by either company, Case announced Monday that AOL's merger with Time Warner "will launch the next Internet revolution."
Newswires |
