Being a visionary is not the same thing as being popular. Odds are, if you're a visionary, most of your years have been a struggle to get others to see what is so apparent to you. This requires arguing people out of long-held beliefs, absorbing countless verbal assaults and clinging to your judgment while friends wonder when you'll start explaining your position to your dog. Yet with every passing day, you grow more certain that you're right.
For the best part of 15 years now, Steve Case has nurtured a vision. Back in the days when modems creaked along at 300 bits a second, when it took half an hour to download a small black-and-white photo and when most Americans were obsessing over CB radios, Case imagined a world where ordinary folk, like the ones he grew up with in Hawaii, would find real utility in connected computers.
Almost everyone considered that a perfectly ridiculous idea. Since 1985, when he founded the company that would become America Online, Case has jousted continually with the doubters. Even his loyal board members lost the faith: in 1987, after a particularly rough patch, they were ready to fire him until someone argued that surely Case had learned something while spending millions without a penny of profit. Whatever that was didn't seem apparent as his online service hit rock bottom last winter, suffering through one gaffe after another--remember the mess over busy signals?--leaving Case exhausted and his critics smirking. When he called a reporter while on his way to Japan one day last spring, his enthusiastic charm had folded. "Look," he snapped, "what I've figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when."
Try last week, Steve. On Monday, AOL astonished the computer and media world with the news that it will swallow CompuServe, the nation's oldest online service, and its 2.6 million members. As part of the deal, AOL sealed a long-term pact with WorldCom, a telephone company based in Jackson, Miss., with scads of capacity, that will help AOL lock in access to phone lines at low rates for the next five years--and probably boost profits. In the three-way agreement, WorldCom bought CompuServe and then handed AOL the online company's 2.6 million subscribers in exchange for AOL's networking and Internet-access division, called ANS (see box).
If the deal goes through--and it will certainly get a hard look from antitrust officials--AOL will have 12 million members, almost six times as many as its nearest competitor, the Microsoft Network. But while the news was big, AOL had no idea the coup would so clearly signal that the company had finally arrived. As congratulatory calls poured in, AOL employees shared a moment of collective corporate shock: "Well, I guess Steve was right."