Remember back in the dot bomb days when AOL was the darling of the industry? Its much vaunted tie up with Time Warner was heralded as the start of a new era led by this thrusting innovative company.

While in hindsight this merger has been proven to be little more than an unmitigated disaster, AOL seems to have caught some sort of bug, unable since then to put a foot right.

This has been borne out by recent news that AOL has seriously compromised its users privacy, something they have apologized for. Why so many missteps? Could it be that AOL is now being run like a traditional old media company, and as such is out of touch with that which made it great in the first place, namely the ability to innovate and change as quickly as the medium of the Internet itself?