AOL Takes AIM

Stephanie Mehta, senior writer at Fortune, took some shots at AOL (AOL: You've gotta catch up).

You see, AOL recently launched new online products – AIM Pages, which is similar to MySpace.com and AIM Phoneline, which is similar to the free phone service of Skype. But, according to Mehta, this is further evidence of the dearth of innovation at AOL.

Yet, this is far from earth shattering news.  The fact is that mega companies rarely innovate.  Did News Corp. start MySpace? Of course not. Did eBay start Skype? No way.

Rather, mega companies like AOL have the cash and market cap to buy innovations or come to the party late with their own offerings. Besides, mega companies bring other benefits to the table, such as brand and user reach. News Corp helped drive growth at MySpace. The same goes for eBay's relationship with Skype.

So, in the case of AOL, it will leverage its huge user base of IM users with AIM Phoneline and AIM Pages. In other words, AOL is doing what big companies are good at.  And innovation usually isn't it.

Actually, the real criticism for AOL is that it developed its own services. Perhaps it would have been better to do what News Corp and eBay did; that is, just buy companies.