A Good Friend Gets the Axe

Jon Miller was held back by a lack of vision on the Time Warner side of AOL. His replacement, a television guy, will be much more comfortable toeing the line. (Getty Images)


Big news in NY today was AOL's replacement of Jon Miller with Randy Falco.

Jon is a good guy, someone who listens and manages through consensus. Unfortunately, that is not what AOL needed. They needed someone to come in with their own plan to fix a sinking ship...Jon had no plan, trying to fix leaks when he needed to build a new ship.

The real oppty, mostly gone now, was to leverage AOL's trusted ecommerce relationship with 35M people and build a business as the transaction center, toll booth of the web. They might still do this, but only have 18M left after Jon's days.

It will be interesting to see what changes are made, if a real plan gets developed or if, as I suspect, there will be more of the same- bailing water from a sinking ship...

Meanwhile, Jon Miller is the ultimate team player and he will move on to something nice, build from within as he does so well. He will also get to spend time with his family, which is good, all good!

Best to you JM.