AOL
Since Stephen Case became the CEO of America Online in 1992, the company has emerged as one of the top Internet providers in the United States. The direction of the company was set by his vision of what an Internet provider should offer the consumer. They set out to aggressively market their new product through brand awareness and market penetration. At the time the top two Internet providers, CompuServe and Prodigy, captured almost 75 percent of the market. To recognize the magnitude of the accomplishment in becoming the market leader, we would like to assess the performance of the CEO. Steve Case led the company with his distinctive vision, which is to have the Internet to become an everyday routine. He felt that people would want to get not only news, and information from the Internet, but also to shop, invest, watch movies etc. We believe that he has performed
Strategically, AOL realized the need to ally itself with companies to establish symbiotic relationship. Such companies include 1-800 Flower, J-Crew, E-Trade, Budget Rent a Car, CBS etc. Their first strategic move was cutting the Internet subscription price substantially to compete with Prodigy and CompuServe. They also were mass mailing the discs and offered free trial. In 1996, they offered flat pricing, which increased the customer base by 1.2million in the last quarter of 1996. Additionally, they had made a deal with Microsoft to have them put AOL program on their operating system in return for offering to use the Microsoft Internet Explorer as the base web browser for AOL. The company financed itself by issuing 1.5billion of common and preferred stock between 1993 and 1995 for their infrastructures and later another $12billion for their acquisitions. Financially
Some common words found in the essay are:
CEO Steve, Pitman COO, America Online, Online Warner, Internet Explorer, Prodigy CompuServe, CompuServe Prodigy, Car CBS, Strategically AOL, AOL Warner, america online, vision internet, customer base, top internet, internet providers, top internet providers,
Approximate Word count = 590
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)
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