A Case study for the times

The mating of elephants is said to be a very private moment, rarely capturedon camera. But the biggest union in corporate history the merg...

The mating of elephants is said to be a very private moment, rarely capturedon camera. But the biggest union in corporate history the merger earlierthis week of America Online AOL and Time Warner has been such a publicspectacle that the world is now expectantly waiting for the 21th centurymammoth that this fusion of Gargantua and Behemoth is expected to yield.

With a combined market value of over 300 billion, the new AOL alreadydwarfs at birth every other company on earth; but who in heavens would wantto bet on its future?Husbanding the grand coalition that has roused thecorporate and techie world to fever pitch is Steve Case, 42, a pioneeringall-American hero in the mould of a whole generation of champion innovatorslike Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Scott McNealy. But unlike his famous peers,Case is not the typical ubergeek who grew up tinkering with computers in hisbasement garage. When Gates and Jobs were fathering motherboards and siringcodes, Case was on the road moving from town to town eating pizza for aliving.

As a marketing executive for Pepsico, it was his job to conceive exoticpizza toppings. 8220;I learnt a lot about big corporation experience,8221; he wasto say in an interview years later about that stint. 8220;A lot of it was aboutleveraging business and not about innovating it was all incremental ratherthan breaking new ground.8221;

So well did he learn to leverage that he has now parlayed his 15-year-oldInternet enterprise into the world8217;s premier firm by buying one of the mostvenerable companies in the world 75 years old with what some would regardas mere paper money AOL8217;s stock value.

Leveraging indeed! But this should hardly surprise anyone who has followedhis career which will surely become THE 8220;Case study8221;, to pitch thatirresistible pun. Entrepreneurial spirit appears to have coursed through hisveins for a long time. Third of four children of a corporate lawyer fatherand school teacher mother, Steve and his older brother Dan ran childhoodenterprises like operating a neighborhood juice stall, in Honolulu,Hawaii.

Unable to break into a marketing school, he took a degree in politicalscience from Williams College in Massachusetts. During his college years, heran the student entertainment committee, sang for two new-wave rock groups,and founded a record company that produced an album representing the bestcollege bands.

His first job with Proctoramp;Gamble also introduced him to his first failure,the elixir of successful businessmen. Case was entrusted with revitalisingsales of Abound, a newly introduced wipe-on hair conditioner in the form ofa towelette. Towelette? You bet! was the banal line he coined for thecampaign. Not surprisingly, it bombed. But Case learnt a lesson that wouldbecome his enduring mantra: Keep It Simple. Years later, AOL8217;s officialslogan would be So simple, no wonder it8217;s No.1.

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It was this mantra that rang in his mind on frustrating evenings in hishotel rooms. During his career as a travelling executive, Case used to foolaround with a Kaypro CP/M personal computer, one of the first PCs in themarket. Through an outsized modem, he would log on to an early subscriptionservice called Source and scour the bulletin boards and chat services. Butthose days, the computers were clunky, modems were slow, and phone lineswere choked. 8220;It was all very painful, rudimentary and time-consuming,8221; hewas to recall. 8220;But I could glimpse the future.

There was something magical being able to dial out to the world fromWichita.8221; America Online was already born in his mind. Meanwhile, hisbrother Dan had joined the investment firm, Hambrecht and Quist. At a 1983consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas, Dan introduced him to executives ofControl Video Corporation, a start-up firm that delivered Atari video gamesto PCs. Renaming CVC as Quantum Computer Services in 1985, Case moved up thehierarchy and developed his first online service, signing deals with Apple,Tandy and IBM to sell the idea. But he was spending so fast and earning solittle that he nearly got fired.

In 1991, he renamed the company again, this time as America Online, andannounced an IPO offering of its stock then valued at 1.86 a share! inMarch 1992, raising 66 million. AOL took off.

By 1997, AOL had stolen ahead by simply blanketing the whole country withfree promotional software and engineering an uneasy truce with Microsoft.Longtime watchers of AOL which is located in a Virginia suburb 30 kmoutside Washington say Case is more of a technocrat than a whiz and hisforte is management. Washington8217;s beltway brahmins also say he is a man ofgreat integrity who has become more and more visible in the area8217;s socialand political causes both he and Time Warner8217;s Levin have been speakingabout the social obligation of the new company.

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Divorced from his first wife in 1996, he recently married a co-worker, andAOL employees speak of his easy conviviality with many of the 12,000employees, most of whom work out of a campus that used to be a BritishAerospace workshop. With a subscriber base of 100 million that the mergergives AOL, the biggest media zeppelin in history seems all set to lift offand be AOL over the place.