Marcien Jenckes Out At AOL

Valleywag reports that Marcien Jenckes, the VP and General Manager of AIM at AOL, is out in the newest round of cuts.

Observing AOL these days is like watching a drunk fall down the stairs.

I still maintain that they should unbundle AIM — the biggest asset they have, I think — and spin it out with a small team focused on doing that well. Sure, continue to have all sorts of media and ad deals with the rest of AOL, but get rid of the bureaucratic cross-integration that ties AIM down, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.

I have met a lot of smart people at AOL, but many are gone, and the culture is extremely inward focused, while the world outside is passing AOL by.

The acquisition of Userplane — widely heralded as one the proofs that Jenckes was smart and moving AIM in the right direction — was a good deal, but we haven’t seen any real revolutionary stuff coming in AIM itself.

Twitter, Jaiku, and a rising tide of flow apps are taking the core principles of instant messaging and moving way beyond what AIM is focused on.

In this new world, instant messaging is a commodity, like landline telephone service when the cell phone explosion came along. AIM, with a foot in the world of communication and another in the world of media, is straddling, and may be loosing its balance.