Holy mackerel. ... That's not small beans in these jaded times.

Clearly it is a really different world than we were living in 1996.

I'm sure one of the clauses in AOL's deal with broadband partners was a fairly hefty commitment as far as how many customers would make the switch. Two dollars removes any sort of price-related inertia that their dial-up customers might feel.

It's interesting this announcement comes so soon on the heels of the Time Warner deal. One of the synergies we see between AOL and Time Warner is TW giving AOL access to their cable.

It's that performance improvement that content distributors have as their key value. By distributing content throughout the Internet, they can improve performance from an end-user's perspective.

For all the new-fangled things people like to talk about, the phone has been the phone for 100 years now,

They're going to sell about five of them. I'm all for integration, and I think customers are, too, but this is way too expensive for the market right now. It's ideal for college students, but they're exactly the ones who can't afford this.

There was this assumption that as soon as people got a notion for what broadband was, they would want it -- that it would be as automatic in some ways as adoption of the dial-up Internet was in the U.S., where growth was very quick and almost happened by itself as opposed to really needing to be sold.

AOL's (customer) base has been with AOL for a long time and has long-established relationships with people. Your online identity is defined by your e-mail address and online or screen name. AOL does community very well.

People realize it's not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket.