>It's a basic repositioning of the company. Instead of making their money from subscribers, a market they have more or less saturated, they want to follow a strategy much closer to Yahoo's -- function as a high volume web portal and make their money from ads. I have no idea whether it will work but it will be interesting to watch. It's rare to see a big company change their strategy so radically.

Actually - and we may be saying basically the same thing - I heard on NPR this morning that it was simply due to the change in the industry and the subscriber service just isn't a viable business model anymore for what they offer. They realized that unless they jumped on the Ad ship, they might find themselves where they were a couple years ago, or worse.