He's been at Google almost from the beginning — originally working out of his house in Connecticut — and he has played a huge role in making Google the ad juggernaut it is today. Thanks to all that work he's probably worth more than $500 million now. All of that will be good for AOL. Will it be good for Armstrong? He thinks so, obviously. I think he's lost his marbles.
Armstrong is smart — indeed, he is one of the smartest ad executives walking. He's one of the few in the industry who is as comfortable with geeks in Silicon Valley as with the power lunch crowd in New York.
The problem is that AOL doesn't just need restructuring, it needs a brain transplant. Its business has been in decline since the last bubble burst — more than eight years ago. It had a great brand. Indeed, for the first decade of its life people thought it was the Internet — like people think of Google today.
But unlike Google, which is an innovation machine, AOL has become a place where good ideas go to die. You don't innovate as an AOL executive anymore, you make grandiose claims about a vision and wait for the next restructuring that frees you from any accountability.
Fixing this poisonous culture will no doubt be Armstrong's first order of business, and if AOL was a stand alone company I'd think he had a good shot at making it happen. The trouble is that AOL isn't a stand alone company. It is part of Time Warner — the folks who own CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers along with Time, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated. Time Warner's content is good, sometimes inspired. But it is one of the least technologically savvy organizations on the planet — and one that has powerful executives who are still proud of that fact.
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