I was really surprised to see the following bit of Javascript show up in the comments of a previous post, and waited awhile to see if it'd get picked up by anyone, but it didn't, so here we are. While I knew Apple knew about it internally for quite awhile, I hadn't yet seen it floating about in the wild -- and I wasn't at liberty to say anything as sometimes part of getting to know something is not being able to talk about it without making the life of the person who passed it on very difficult.
posted on April 12, 2006 at 12:25 PMSubject: Wincent is mad at youHe's mad about the "Deja doom" image on your site:
Did you send those e-mails to him? I'm inclined to believe that it was some jerk pulling a prank in reaction to Wincent's original post. I hope so anyway. You sending those e-mails would *not* be cool.
Steve
Yeah, I had that passed on by 3 readers, two of which weren't as polite. Since their claims look a little silly when things are put into context, I'll do them the favor of using yours. It's a hysterical funny read by the time you get to the emails and see him building on wild assumption after wild assumption, yet kinda scary in its way. I've included a screenshot in case it goes away, as one of two things seems to be going on:
- Wincent Colaiuta is mental, and just making the emails up. People that delusional are pretty rare, so I consider this to be a very low probability.
- Someone is pranking him, and he doesn't know enough about how these things work to realize what's going on or what to look for, and is jumping to hysterical conclusions all across the board. I consider this to be a very high probability.
Now, to be extremely clear...
On Monday, we will announce to all employees the official name change of the company from America Online, Inc. to AOL LLC.AOL is changing its name from "America Online, Inc." to "AOL LLC" as the final step of its brand transformation that launched in 2005. In addition, AOL is converting from a corporation to a limited liability company as part of its agreement with Google.
Some days I wish I could get my hands on the entire agreement that took place between AOL and Google, if only to grep it for phrases including the word "firstborn."
Much of it was laid out in the AOL Strategic Alliance section of Google's 10-K SEC filing in 2005 (such as hopeful interoperability between their IM services), but there's obviously details floating about on cocktail napkins that weren't. A Netscape Connect agreement which was updated a few minutes ago is the first place I've seen the name change actually happen, but lends credence that it's all really going down.
