actually, Steve, maybe you should reconsider the whole "never give up for dead" thing

Steven Case spoke at the D8 conference today – here's a rough sense of the conversation.

The best part is that he still thinks AOL can come back as a consumer brand:

Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

And the reason he thinks this is because Apple did "the same thing" and came back from the dead.

Case seems to be saying that the reason he doesn't have to be worried is because, well, the Red Sox came back from being down 3 games to the Yankees in 2004.

Yeah, it's not impossible. But it took a miraculous set of circumstances to make that happen. (Like Curt Schilling's pitching on a torn tendon in Game Six. Yeah, that's what the picture is.) And as for Steve Jobs, well, he's got a unique sense of how consumers and technology can come together. Not a lot of people like him.

I mean, just look at AOL these days. It's a shockingly generic content portal – some news, some sports, some weather, no compelling reason to be there, or go back.

With a subscriber base that's been shrinking since 2002 and a product offering that still includes dial-up as a central component, I don't think anyone is actively thinking about how to make a miracle happen right now with AOL.