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How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)


15 years on, Winamp "still lives"—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping.

For instance, in 2000, just a year after the acquisition, Frankel released (and open sourced) Gnutella, a new “headless” peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that understandably steamed the bigwigs at AOL corporate headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. Developers and entrepreneurs rub shoulders on sunny days in South Park, an adjacent outdoor space that features a gourmet grilled cheese outfit, a taqueria, and a French restaurant with killer quiches.

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