Time Warner has finally made a practical decision with regard to AOL - it intends spinning off AOL as an independent company by 2009-end! According to Time Warner, AOL as an independent entity will have a better chance of achieving its full potential in its specific media domain.

After the much-hailed 2001 mega media merger of AOL and Time Warner - a deal that valued at $124 billion - the nightmare for the companies began with the so-called bursting of the dot-com bubble. The companies started despising each other, as AOL's stock turned out to be highly overrated, and its business mold rolled towards an unprecedented decline.

With Time Warner's CEO, Gerard Levin, quitting within a year of the merger, and AOL's CEO and co-founder Steve Case leaving a year later, the year 2002 saw the new company post a monstrous $100 billion loss.

Currently, the value of AOL can be put roughly between $5.5 billion and $6.5 billion - the figures conveying a great deal about speculative bubbles, more so with the earlier extravagant overstretching by AOL and the almost intractable blindness of investors!

After the spin off AOL as an independent company, Time Warner will focus on its old media empire consisting of movies, cable TV networks and magazines; while AOL will largely focus on Internet access, web sites, and online advertising.