Tim Armstrong: No more dial-up welfare at AOL

As you may have heard by now, this is the week that AOL decouples from Time Warner and spins off as an independent venture. CEO Tim Armstrong marked the occasion with a keynote Q&A session at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference, where he delivered answers polished to a high gloss by his recent investor road show.

Armstrong was gentle but unequivocal in his criticism of the company's pre-2009 strategy and management. In particular, he said, the cash generated by the highly profitable but fast-shrinking dial-up access business has too long served to paper over, or even enable, inefficiency across AOL (which, for the record, owns DailyFinance). "The other part of the company got loose in terms of how it was using assets," he said.