The day nearly away from me without my mentioning that it's AOL's 25th anniversary. Instead of a cheers, it seems more fitting to mark this milestone with a moment of silence.

Anyway AOL, which started as America OnLine is still alive if not well. Of course, you would never know that by looking at Google's main search page. Google had that excellent tribute to Pac-Man the other day. But for AOL.... (cue the crickets.)

AOL's slide from once being the hottest company on the Internet to being seen as a dinosaur is one of the most stunning Icarus stories in the annals of American business.

Morning Edition noted the anniversary on Monday as have others. NPR's Tamara Keith gave a sense of how fast and far the company has fallen since the days when its dial-up service was the standard in Internet connectivity.

TAMARA: Slow or not, AOL was a phenomenon. In December of 1999, the company was worth $222 billion. In 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner. And it's easy to forget, but AOL was in the driver's seat. It's now seen as one of the worst mergers in the history of business...

... AOL separated from Time Warner last year, a shadow of its former self. The company went from 19,000 employees at its peak to about 5,000 now. But get this: Several of them are Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and well-known sports columnists hired recently. The goal is to combine content, technology and advertising in a way that redefines the Internet...

... Mr. TIM ARMSTRONG (CEO, America Online): We're 25, so we're roughly just getting out of college. So we have our future career to go at AOL, and that's what we're focused on.

TAMARA: But while the company focuses on its future, its present is a little rocky. AOL's first-quarter earnings report showed revenues down 23 percent from the year before.

Mr. CLAYTON MORAN (Analyst, The Benchmark Company): I think they have very strong leadership with a focused plan, and that's half the battle.

TAMARA: Clayton Moran is an analyst at The Benchmark Company.

 

Mr. MORAN: But there's no signs in their financial or operating results that indicate this company is turning itself around yet.

TAMARA: And then there's the issue of brand perception. There are a whole lot of people who, like Loni Love, still think of AOL as the dial-up company.

Ms. LOVE: Now AOL is the grandma of online Web services. I mean, we don't need it anymore. It's 25 years old. It needs some Botox or something because it's old.

TAMARA: Though, to hear AOL CEO Tim Armstrong tell it, this isn't a problem. It's an opportunity. Folks at AOL point to Apple as an example: an early leader, then declared a dead brand, and now Apple rules.

AOL is hoping for its own resurrection story.