This article primarily chronicles the uneasy relationship
between AOL and Microsoft, but also offers some background on AOL’s
recently-shelved plans to create an “AOL PC” that would have run
Linux: a project that involved several rounds of discussions with
Eazel after AOL became concerned over Hailstorm.
In the end, reports the Times, AOL decided “competing
head-to-head on the PC desktop against Microsoft was a battle that
AOL could not win. Instead, they said, AOL Time Warner sees the
Internet and future interactive television systems as more
opportunistic fields.”