Michel blew away my first week-end guess: the answer of today’s quizz was of course Steve Case, a co-founder and former CEO of America Online, later known as AOL. I was actually hoping to attract people and start a nice conversation, but I gave away too many information: Michel, a former marketing executive at PepsiCo, guessed thanks to the mention of the 1992 IPO, pioneering the Internet era. Kari would’ve found out thanks to the last sentence referring to the ethical blunder: a few weeks ago, AOL released the search histories of about 650,000 users – making privacy concerns hit the headlines and urging some of its top executives to leave the company.

In 2000, Case, the “third” Steve (Ballmer at MS and Wozniak at Apple) was under the Wall Street spotlights when an 11-year old ISP, AOL, took over for $166bn the century-old, traditional media company, namely Time Warner.

The MTV cofounder Case had hired to deal with the day-to-day running of the business was Bob Pittman. Under Pittman’s reign, who made customer acquisition cost go down from 400$ to $100-, Amazon ($19m) and Barnes & Nobles ($40m) bid and overbid to gain book-selling exclusivity.

What I like about Steve Case is his unconditional enthousiasm when speaking about customers. Steve Case was obsessed with customers. And I quote: “The center of my world is consumers. Every day I wake up and say, How can we make America Online more interesting, more useful, more fun, more affordable, so that it will attract a broader audience?“. And yet another: “Our strategy has always been crystal clear. Consumers want one place where they can find good Internet content and meet interesting people. And they want someone to make it easy for them”.

Doesn’t this last sentence remind you of anything? (Relatively) good Internet content + meet interesting people (well, people who with you share at least one common interest) = weblogs. Assuming this mission statement is still current at AOL, shouldn’t AOL competed with weblog service providers like Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger?

Related posts:

1. IT industry entrepreneur: Guess who I am? N.1
2. Google stock price above 500$
3. Marketing case study: Rosetta Stone rocks
4. Minutes of the IE-Club lecture at Microsoft France on European Rising Stars of the Internet
5. Software, in short