Here is an interesting New York Times article on AOL. Click here to read it. It centers on Tim Armstrong’s 100 day strategy reset for the company. I am proud of Tim. He has given the company back to its employees and consumers and partners. He went on a road trip and visited every AOL campus, met with thousands of people and developed a new plan that embraces what worked in the past with his own twist on what the future holds.

I have been invited and have accepted Tim Armstrong’s request to come and speak to AOL employees on Friday at the AOL campus in Dulles, VA. It should be a fun day.

I don’t even need to read Tim’s formal strategy announcements or all of the press around it. I believe that what Tim wants to do is truly embrace many of AOL’s core tenants going back to the past – to build a platform for growth – and to position the company for the future. Tim and his team “get it” and this new plan will work.

Consumers matter. If you make great products and provide great and friendly services, usage and engagement will increase. Green arrows will happen. Growth is good. Everything starts with great products and services and a focus on consumers. Everything good flows from being humble and listening to Main Street NOT Wall Street! Consumers want speed, efficiency, simplicity and honesty. Get a balance back in terms of serving consumers. If consumers love you, advertisers will too. It is the product, stupid! Remember when we used to say that? Members rule. Consumers need to be loved.

Communications is key. Making email and messaging the best they can be is of utmost importance. AIM is a great asset for consumers and for the company. AIM was the original real time service and the start of social networking. Status messaging was the original Twitter. Embrace and extend it. AOL mail was a best of class product. Make it better, faster, easier with less spam and less ads baked into it. Focus and invest in mail and messaging; mobile communications; and core killer apps. Communications is still the best way to gain consumer interest and generate unique visitors and page views and engagement. This is meat and potatoes. Cook ‘em good.

Brands. AOL is a mega brand. Don’t hide from it. Polish it up. Advertising.com is the best B to B brand on the web. Don’t run away from it. Re-embrace it. Advertising.com is a money store for the industry but the AOL brand and its new content properties deserve a specialized, informed ad sales force that understands each audience and can sell the properties with the dignity they each deserve. It is OK to focus on search; cpm; cpc; cpa; and subscription sales in an integrated way but also sell in a specialized focused manner. Walk and chew gum! It can be done. Love the partners. Don’t sell them anything, solve their problems. We are in it together. If they succeed, we will succeed. This is how you will get revenue growth again. It wasn’t too long ago that we were racking up 50 percent growth quarters. It can and will be done.

Content. We launched AOL Studios in 1994, Greenhouse in 1993. We have always believed in new content brands; new properties; and new ways of looking at consumer focused audience specific new properties. MediaGlow is another twist on our past – a great one I might add – launching lots of different brands off of AOL infrastructure to the web at large becoming the largest publisher on the web is part of AOL’s DNA and destiny. And because AOL has scale and a platform and talent and a sales force and profits and cash flow, I bet on them to win NOT on traditional publishers that are truly struggling in their core business. This is a winnable game. AOL is back on the right track here. The competition is greatly weakened here. Go fast – go, go, go!

Local matters. We launched Digital Cities and acquired Moviefone and MapQuest. We pioneered in local. We even had deals with the Chicago Tribune and New York Times to be “local affiliates” in 1992. Eighty percent of all consumer spending happens within 25 miles of their home. Geo serving and targeting is in AOL’s DNA. Search is at its heart a local ad business. Getting back to basics on local is smart business and good for the consumer and small and local based business. I have always been a believer. This is where e-commerce happens. All politics are local, a basic deliverable and another place where AOL is positioned to win. Local also has to become AOL’s international strategy. There is NO GLOBAL or International strategy. Each market is unique and different and LOCAL in nature. I am proud of the AOL India launch as an example. That was last local launch I worked on.

Partnerships. We launched Greenhouse and then AOL Investments back in the early 90′s. We modeled it on Liberty Media. It is a great way to help launch and build value in new businesses. It is a great way to build value in equity appreciation. It is a great way to get focus of management teams that have to compete on their own. It is a great way to build a keiretsu of partners all aligned around common goals. AOL can use some of its free cash flow to make smart VC-like investments here. Let us NOT forget that Google was an original AOL investment. That one turned out pretty well for us. And for Tim, too.

Perhaps the most important focus for AOL is to become again a pure play new media and interactive services company: Having singular focus on disruption to the status quo; generating a culture of innovation and speed to market again; and acting like a Web 2.0 startup by taking risks and not being afraid of making big bets. That was when AOL was always at its best. Play offense and lean in. Make some big acquisitions and make them successful. Don’t dabble. Play to win!

It is not about walled gardens. It is not about centralized big portals. It is not about ad sales. It is about consumers; a balance between AOL and new brands; about web syndication of properties and services; and about lots of interactive data flowing through AOL’s engines. Learn from the data. Learn from the consumers. Listen well. Act aggressively. Focus on the “vital few” things that matter and have some fun again, too.

There are many great assets that Tim has inherited: A top interactive audience; a huge scalable platform; an engaged work force that wants to win again; a large base of revenues; profits and cash flow; and newly found independence as a spun out company. It is a great time to be an AOL employee. It is a great time to be an AOL partner. It is a great time to be a user of an AOL service.

Make us all proud Tim. We are rooting for your success. Think different but embrace your past while sprinting fast to the future.