In cyberspace, America Online's goal is to be "anywhere, any time."
But in physical space, the world's largest Internet service provider sits on about 40 hectares in Loudoun County, on the fringe of the national capital region where pastures are giving way to office parks.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The AOL campus, with six modern buildings, sprawls next to an overgrown field where an aging silo stands sentinel. Across the street is a Wal-Mart store.
The bucolic setting may suggest that this campus is just another distant outpost of AOL Time Warner Inc, the powerful parent company based in New York.
But Dulles is the place where AOL Time Warner's future will be decided.
While the media conglomerate may produce glamorous magazines in Rockefeller Center, make movies in Los Angeles and package cable news in Atlanta, it looks to the Internet operations in Dulles for rich profits.
"As far as AOL being the growth engine of AOL Time Warner, it clearly is," said Mark Stavish, executive vice president of human resources. "The financial expectations on AOL are dramatic."
Last Wednesday, when AOL Time Warner announced its second-quarter financial results, America Online's importance was underscored again. For the corporation, quarterly revenues were up just 3 percent over last year. The music division's revenues were down 11 percent, and the publishing division's were off 1 percent.
But the AOL division's revenues jumped 13 percent to US$2.14 billion. AOL subscription growth set a record for the quarter, shooting up by 1.3 million to reach 30.1 million members, despite a US$1.95 price increase that pushed AOL's monthly subscription rate to US$23.90.
"The vast majority of growth for this company is going to come out of AOL," Stavish said.
The Dulles work force of 3,700 includes engineers, programmers, marketers, lawyers, content developers, network managers and human resources staff. Together, these employees are expected to provide the ideas that will attract new subscribers and keep old ones paying their monthly fees.
"The next evolution of AOL is going to be, how do we make sure you can access your AOL account from a cell phone, a Palm Pilot" or any other mobile device, Stavish said. The Dulles workers' mission is to make sure that "your information is available to you any time, anywhere in the world and on any platform."
Though it laid off 725 employees, including about 300 in Dulles, following this January's merger with Time Warner, America Online plans to resume its phenomenal employment growth before long.
Construction crews are just finishing a day-care center for 150 children, and have started moving earth for a new 18,580-square-meter office building. Plans call for construction of two more buildings of similar size. Each is intended to house an additional 700 employees.
The campus here 50km west of Washington already encloses 149,000 square meters of offices, but provides workers with little in the way of urban amenities such as trendy restaurants and coffee shops.
Still, AOL workers are mostly happy campers, routinely telling company surveys that they enjoy their jobs, Stavish said. Many have become millionaires from their AOL stock.
And while other Internet-related companies in the vicinity, such as PSINet Inc and Teligent Inc, have filed for bankruptcy protection recently, AOL has remained a thriving employer.
The online service was launched in 1989 in nearby Vienna, Virginia, with a relative handful of workers. When it began growing wildly in the mid-1990s, the company started looking for a wide-open site to turn into a major campus.
In 1996, AOL settled on the Loudoun County site, where a large office building was available for occupancy. Since then, construction has been nearly constant.
Not only was AOL frantically adding workers and subscribers during the late 1990s, it was snapping up companies such as CompuServe, MapQuest, MovieFone, ICQ, Netscape and Quack. With the January merger, it gained access to the extensive information and entertainment products and services of Time Warner.
But at the same time, it lost something else: its independence. In January last year, when America Online Inc chairman Steve Case announced that his young company would acquire the venerable Time Warner Inc, many analysts predicted the Internet wunderkind would end up running the sprawling corporation.
Since the merger closed seven months ago, however, Rockefeller Center has emerged as the headquarters, and AOL Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin has been calling the shots.
Though Case, 42, holds the title of chairman, he continues to live in northern Virginia and stays away from day-to-day operations.
"From our perspective [in Dulles], you could say we lost a little bit of our identity because we're a part of a much bigger organization now," Stavish said. "But what we gained was access to this enormous array of brands," such as CNN and Warner Bros movies.
Now the pressure is on Barry Schuler, 47, chairman and chief executive of AOL, to pull those assets together to make AOL indispensable to its US subscribers and to attract new ones overseas.
Outside the US, AOL already has 6.6 million subscribers and is trying hard to pick up more in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
In the next few years, Schuler's biggest challenge will be the coming battle with another behemoth, Microsoft Corp, for the eyeballs of Internet users.
This fall, Microsoft is rolling out its next-generation Windows XP operating system and its .Net Internet-based business plan. The moves are intended to shift Microsoft away from reliance on software licenses and toward subscription and transaction fees for software and services.
Microsoft wants to make sure that in the future, when consumers are making decisions about how to go on line to communicate, gather information, shop, entertain themselves or seek out business services, they will turn to Microsoft.
AOL, likewise, wants to be the singular source of online happiness for consumers. As the two companies square off over key technologies, such as instant messaging and video teleconferencing, AOL will be counting on the brains in Dulles to out-think the opposition.
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