AOL taps Garlinghouse for revamp of mobile and e-mail segments

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Brad Garlinghouse. Credit: AOL.

As AOL prepares to blast off from parent company Time Warner Inc. in the coming months, the Internet company and its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, are working to fill up the tanks with rocket fuel.

Late Monday, AOL announced it had hired former Yahoo Inc. executive Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and Mobile Communications -- a position that will oversee some of AOL’s best-known properties, including its instant messaging software and its e-mail system (‘You’ve Got Mail’), as the company tries to set a course towards prosperity in an overcrowded digital cosmos.

At Yahoo, Garlinghouse made headlines when he demonstrated a quality that AOL sorely needs -- a disdain for corporate complacency. In a memo circulated to Yahoo employees in 2006, later known as the ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto,’ Garlinghouse called the company’s management out in dramatic terms, recommending that Yahoo undergo a ‘radical reorganization,’ ‘blow up the matrix’ and ‘kill redundancies.’

Aggressive thinking is the order of the day for AOL, which has suffered brand and user attrition since its days as a dial-up service, and which is now reinventing itself as a social communications hub.

‘There’s no doubt there are challenges ahead,’ Garlinghouse said by phone Monday. But that’s ‘one of the reasons I’m excited about it.’

Though Garlinghouse and Armstrong -- also on the call -- spoke mostly in the abstract about what AOL might look like in 2010, the general idea is for AOL to focus and monetize the many communications streams people are now using.

‘When you think about the future of messaging -- where you have phone, text, e-mail -- content floats on those same surfaces,’ said Armstrong, a former senior advertising executive at Google.

And where users and content commingle, advertising wants to follow. ‘There’s a tremendous amount of information and data that gets kicked off of our products and services which allow us to make all of our systems smarter,’ Armstrong added.

Garlinghouse will also be the West Coast point man for AOL Ventures, the company’s business incubation arm that will be increasingly looking to acquire start-ups that would fit AOL’s growth strategy.

‘I think with Tim’s heritage at Google and my heritage at Yahoo, we both see tremendous networks of people and companies to tap into,’ Garlinghouse said.

-- David Sarno