They've done a good job of managing the release schedule. What the company has done is balance it out very nicely so you don't have a huge hit to earnings from the fall off in revenue following a blockbuster. The year after Fox had Titanic, it had nothing. We'll see how long AOL can keep this going. Nobody's ever done it forever.

AT&T's basic business is transport, so to the extent that AOL would give them more traffic and to the extent that AT&T could limit AOL's involvement with its competitors . . . it's certainly something they need to look at.

That's what is behind Microsoft's interest in AOL. They are looking at combining MSN and AOL, two underperforming assets, cut the costs, and come up with a single productive asset. Both MSN IM and Yahoo IM are on the outs. AOL dominates that market. So this deal has the same idea behind it as MSN/AOL.

Isn't it true that the most important factor for AOL in choosing Internet Explorer was getting software that worked well with AOL's client software?

A number of developments are happening on the Internet that AOL couldn't ignore.

AOL has some great content that is broadly appealing to consumers. One thing that Microsoft lacks for MSN is a lot of good content.

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

Windows XP is designed to bring more choice and options to consumers, not fewer, in stark contrast to AOL Time Warner's closed, proprietary strategy.

It will put a short-term top on the stock. I think it marks the end of an era -- the last remnant of excesses and looking at fundamentals through rose-colored glasses. Now people are going to look at AOL and value it as a media conglomerate and find it's fairly valued.

AOL just zoomed by Prodigy, ... Prodigy has to differentiate itself to grab a piece of the market that it can own.