"But Case said he fears everyone and remains the most paranoid person at AOL." -- from aol.com

But Case said he fears everyone and remains the most paranoid person at AOL. "I learn a lot from history because no one thought much of AOL and here we are," he said, "so I exaggerate the risks and diminish the advantages."

And for the future? "We'll see won't we," said Case, in a terse and enigmatic way that leaves listeners wondering whether he has some insight of what tomorrow will bring. Because, although Steve Case is not telling you this, deep down, you suspect he probably has a notion of what the truth is. And the truth is, nobody knows.

PAUL SCHINDLER: Thank you for reading from your book aol.com. Is that a fair title for a book about America Online? After all, they were dragged screaming and kicking into the Internet.
SWISHER: Absolutely.

SCHINDLER: So, to name your book aol.com seems to indicate they had a little more prescience along this vector than they really had.
SWISHER: That's the e-mail address, not the Web address. It [the title] was actually @aol.com, but the people at Random House felt that bookstore employees wouldn't be able to file it correctly. Initially, I wanted it to be @aol.com, and they just felt it would get lost -- that someone in Kansas wouldn't be able to locate it within the store. So they changed it. It's the e-mail address, which millions and millions of people have.

SCHINDLER: At several points in the book, you describe moments when AOL could have sold out and ceased to exist as we know it. I'd like you to describe two of them, when they came close to selling to Paul Allen, and then, nearly contemporaneously, to Bill Gates. Let's start with Paul Allen.
SWISHER: They wanted to be very catholic in their associations, in terms of making lots of alliances with lots of different people, because they thought that was the way they would prevail. Paul Allen had very specific ideas of what he wanted, including broadband access. He wanted, basically, to make AOL the Internet, because this was pre-Internet. He felt AOL could become what later became the Internet and the Web. They felt as if they had been struggling for so many years, and the immediate future was dial-up modem access. They thought he was too pie-in-the-sky. He was trying to be very forceful with his vision, and they didn't share it.

Even though he owned 25 percent of the company, which is quite a lot, they wanted nothing to do with him.

The more serious thought was to link with Microsoft. That made a lot more sense. They were interested in creating an online service very similar to AOL, and so half the board wanted to do it and half didn't.

SCHINDLER: You describe a meeting with Bill Gates. Has anyone disputed the quotation you attribute to him?
SWISHER: Just Bill Gates. C O N T I N U E D . . . 2 of 2
SCHINDLER: Everyone else in the room heard it your way. Which was ...

"I could buy 20 percent of you, I could buy all of you, or I could just go into this business and bury you." -- Bill Gates, reportedly, to AOL

SWISHER: "I could buy 20 percent of you, I could buy all of you, or I could just go into this business and bury you." I don't think he was threatening. It was a weird threat. I think he was actually discussing the state of the situation. I think it was true what he was saying. I don't think it was false because most people thought the moment Microsoft entered the market it was over for AOL, because they were No. 4 or 5, even. They were not a powerhouse. The fourth or fifth player often drops out.

SCHINDLER: It does sound consistent with the known public personae of Bill Gates.
SWISHER: Right. There are a million stories in Silicon Valley of someone from Microsoft sort of saying, "Well, you know we're going to kill you." In software, I think I'd be a lot more nervous. In this area, I think he saw it as software and didn't perceive it as something that was more of a service and community thing. That's where he had his great fault.

SCHINDLER: In the book Burn Rate, AOL management is described as dysfunctional, with revolving-door management; every time author Michael Wolff went back, he met with different people. Is that a fair characterization?
SWISHER: Yeah. From Michael's point of view, absolutely. It was organized chaos at AOL and it still is in many ways. It's a little more organized than it used to be.

We were talking. We think the books complement each other very nicely. He actually finished [reading] my book and he said, "I realize I like these guys a lot more than I used to."

From his perspective, he had a bad experience with them and it didn't work out and these are the memories he carries with him.

I think if you were a content provider, you might find AOL very frustrating. I had a whole section about content providers [which I left out]. I think if you picked apart The Wall Street Journal's internal politics, it would be just as dysfunctional, or any organization. CMP. Whatever.

Michael is writing from the perspective of a disgruntled and unhappy ... it is one side of a divorce. It is certainly true for him, and it is true, really, in his experience. I love that book. It made me laugh out loud.

SCHINDLER: Why are they [AOL] unkillable, the cockroach of cyberspace?
SWISHER: I call them the Digital Dracula, the online Lazarus. Because, one of the things the press does, the trade does, the digerati does, they assume that because they don't like it the consumers [won't like it].

Technology companies are really lax in their consideration of consumers. Your Windows system crashes all the time, your software has glitches. You wouldn't put up with this in any other medium at all. Your television not working properly? You turn it on, it works.

What I was fascinated with is that the press was either incredibly negative or incredibly positive on AOL. I remember a cover of Business Week, where Steve [Case] was lying on a pile of disks and it said "Steve Case's Universe" or something, and it was right before a series of mishaps that would have just killed off anybody.

Nobody wanted to look at this as a much more complex story. They weren't just good, they weren't just bad, they were struggling to create something.

The second thing is the vast majority of users do not want a complex technology solution for them. They want something very simple, very easy. They want to use e-mail and they want to chat. They want to communicate with each other or send pictures. But it is mostly centered around communications, and AOL was utterly dedicated to that in a way that other people [weren't].

I mean, push [technology], who cares? You know what I mean? People just don't want to use technology in the way people in Silicon Valley do. Here, they can build their own computers. AOL is not elegant. It doesn't matter for most people. They just want to send e-mail for the most part. To feel safe within the technology. The Web is getting easier every day, but it is still a pain in the neck to use, as far as I'm concerned. It will get better over time, but it is still not as easy as AOL.

[AOL] is easy to install, easy to use, easy to understand. A very average person can use it without having to understand what a Winsock is. I remember Winsock jumped up on my computer, and I said "What the heck is that?" Most people just want to use the technology and ignore it completely pretty much.