AOL was worth more than Disney, Philip Morris, or even IBM; it was worth more than General Motors and Boeing combined.33 But the gorilla had a problem. It was no secret to anyone in the tech industry that the days of dial-up modems were numbered. The long-promised dream of broadband—web browsing at speeds thirty times faster than the 56,000 bits per second that was state-of-the-art for AOL’s millions of users—was just around the corner.
