Steve Case
Categories: 1958 births | Entrepreneurs | Business leaders | Forbes 400 | America Online | People from Hawaii
Steve Case (born August 21, 1958) was a top corporate officer of America Online, the world's most successful proprietary online service. He was ousted as chairman in January 2003 following financial troubles and accounting scandals.
Case grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, showing an early entreprenurial bent. He graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1980 with a degree in political science, and began working as a marketer at Procter & Gamble soon after. In 1983 he became a marketing consultant at Control Video, a small company that distributed games for the Atari 2600 game console using a phone line and modem.
In 1983 Control Video nearly went bankrupt, and investor Frank Caufield had a friend of his, Jim Kimsey, brought in as a manufacturing consultant. Kimsey hired Case as a part-time consultant, and he later joined the company as a full-time marketing employee. In 1985 Kimsey became CEO of the newly-renamed Quantum Computer Services and promoted Case to vice-president of marketing, and in 1987 promoted him again to executive vice-president. Kimsey groomed Case to become Chairman and CEO when Kimsey retired, and the transition formally took place in 1991 (CEO) and 1995 (Chairman).
As part of the changes that gave birth to Quantum, Case changed the company's strategy, creating an online service called Quantum Link (Q-Link for short) for the Commodore 64 in 1985 with programmer (and AOL co-founder) Marc Seriff. In 1988, Quantum began offering the AppleLink online service for Apple and PC-Link for IBM compatible computers. In 1991 he changed the company name to America Online and merged the Apple and PC services under the AOL name; the new service reached 1 million subscribers by 1994, and Q-Link was terminated October 31 of that year.
Among many initiatives in the early years of AOL, Case personally championed many innovative online interactive titles and games, including graphical chat environments Habitat (1986) and Club Caribe (1989), the interactive fiction series QuantumLink Serial by Tracy Reed (1988), Quantum Space, the first fully automated Play by email game (1989), and the original Dungeons and Dragons title Neverwinter Nights, the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) to depict the adventure with graphics instead of text (1991).
After a decade of hyper-growth, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner. The $106 billion merger was completed in January 2001 but quickly ran into trouble as part of the dot-com recession, compounded by accounting scandals. Case announced his resignation as chairman in January 2003, although remained on the company's board of directors for almost three more years. Case resigned from the board of directors in October of 2005, to spend more time working on Revolution LLC. Revolution LLC, a holding company founded by Case, holds majority stakes in several healthcare and resort firms, and in August 2005 purchased a controlling interest in Flexcar. In addition, Case also holds a majority stake in the Hawaii-based Maui Land and Pineapple Co.. He also controls tens of thousands of acres of land in Hawaii. [1]
Case resigned from the Time Warner Board of Directors on November 1, 2005.
Case is the cousin of Hawaii Congressman Ed Case. [2]
References
- Klein, Alec (2003). Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-5984-X.
- Interview detailing Case's support for early games, and effects of explosive growth