The age of the crashable watch. I bet Dick Tracy never got a Blue Screen of Death.

Seriously, though, who needs one of these things? In the 80’s I was in 8th grade, and I had one of those big ass calculator watches. I was the biggest nerd on campus because of it. I had to switch to a smaller discreet watch that you could play tennis on. And even that got me in trouble when people would see me staring at my watch for twenty minutes. But now, fifteen years later, they actually want people to wear nerdy watches like this? I guess these days being a nerd is cool. I must have been born a few years early.

I don’t even wear a watch anymore. I just make sure there’s a clock everywhere I go.

So Steve Case has left AOL. Thousands of voices have already chimed in on this subject, and I certainly don’t have much to add. I’m always a day behind anyway. I agree with Doc Searls, who said “cut off the head and the body dies”, but I know AOL won’t go away completely. They have enough subscribers to keep hobbling along in some form, and there are too many people (like my mother-in-law) who will never be able to leave the safety of AOL for any other kind of “real” internet connection, so to speak. So AOL will survive. But will Case’s replacement be able to revitalize it and keep it relevant? Will Time Warner cast it off and leave it for dead? Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!

AOL will stick around forever, moving through AOL 9.0, AOL 10.0 (AOL X?), and so on until the inevitable – MSAOL.