AOL Searching for Some Direction

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I've spent a lot of time looking at AOL(AOL) recently as a potential long. People ask me why -- a lot. The amount of people who have completely given up on AOL is actually rather remarkable.

I thought Yahoo!(YHOO) was the most hated tech company in the world, with perhaps the most Dilbert-like dysfunctional organizational culture. It's not. AOL beats them by a country mile.

Business Insider has reported there will be a big "come-to-Jesus" (or "come-to-Tim-or-Arianna" if you prefer) meeting this week in New York with their top 100 operating executives to discuss the company's future.

Here's the money quote from that article:

This year, the true believers in attendance will tell Tim Armstrong that they are starting to lose faith.

"A lot of people are looking at [our stock price] and saying 'what is the strategy in 2012?' Obviously things aren't working out right now," says one executive who is attending the meeting.

This AOL source wants clarification on a number of major topics.

"I truly don't know what we're about right now," this source says.

It's very easy to find former AOL execs to talk to these days about how things are going at the company. Because they're "former," you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt. However, even for this type of group, the anger and disdain for the company is running extremely high.

One ex-executive told me that "ethnic cleansing" within the company is alive and rampant. I asked him what he meant and he talked about how all the old-time AOLers (pre-Tim) are paranoid about the Google(GOOG) people and Huffington Post people who've joined recently. The AOLers dislike the Googlers and HuffPo because both think they're super-smart. Each group assumes others like them are smartest while everyone else is ready to knife you in the back as soon as you turn their back to them in a dark alley.

Another ex-AOL employee referred to a practice of "sniper firings." This, it was explained to me, was when you're a high-priced executive who hasn't been delivering enough revenue in your group and there's pressure from the board to cut costs. In those cases, you're shown the door. Jeff Levick and Brad Garlinghouse both fall into this category. As I've been told, this wasn't a case of Tim not having Brad's product vision that he'd originally shared when Brad came on board. This was about cutting costs.