AOL Swallows Time January 12, 2000January 28, 2017 Some of you know I have an interest in Quickbrowse, which is getting better and cleaner and easier by the week. The latest version went up last night. Usership is growing. We are thinking of acquiring Sears.st interface went up last night. New users are beginning to sign on at an ever increasing rate. We are thinking of acquiring Disney. OK, so we are not yet public. Nor have we revenue. But we are not thinking about Disney or Viacom or NBC, whom other, more established new media companies covet. We do not propose to jostle Yahoo’s investment bankers with our own (once we retain some). But Sears is the sort of backwater old-economy company we just might be able to swallow and reenergize. We will even let current management run the combined company for a while, while we hire an ad sales staff and an accountant. Seriously: Hats off to Steve Case and crew. I use AOL all the time. I think AOL needed Time Warner more than Time Warner needed AOL – that Time’s shareholders are getting too small a slice of the proposed pie (we plan to be more generous with the shareholders of Sears) – but there’s no denying a good fit here. There’s also no denying the trend toward just a handful of global giants in most fields, which makes me nervous. A long time ago, I wrote an article called “The Day They Couldn’t Fill the Fortune 500,” for New York Magazine. Almost seems as if it’s coming true. Jim Fowler: “I would like to receive your daily column via email. Is this possible?” Just scroll down to the bottom of this page and click the gray-and-red Q-Page button. Another fine service of Quickbrowse-Sears. (Have your own family web page you’d like to enable others to receive by e-mail on a schedule of their choosing? Click the hyperlink just below the button. You can Q-Page your web page or fledgling web site easily and for free.)