Dear whomever replaces Bob Pittman: Please know, one of your biggest competitors now is eBay, especially with the purchase of PayPal. They now have a billing relationship with a large percentage, perhaps even a majority, of your customers. And they’re using Microsoft’s Passport for authentication.

Because your AOL client software sucks so thoroughly in so many ways, (People have built better mail clients than yours in HTML and javascript. Yours is a multi-megabyte monster that people install on their computers, and it still is so poor as to be offensive.) your only value is that you have a payment infrastructure that could be leveraged for third parties to accept payment.

But you won’t do it. You’ll screw it up. I have faith in you, AOL. I know you’ll blow your chance.