NEW YORK -- In the press reports that followed the announcement of AOL and Time Warner's wedding, a few folks (including me) made much of the sartorial relevance of TW's Gerald Levin being tieless at the press conference while AOL's Steve Case was decked out in a pretty nice suit. Levin even made a joke about the "suits from Virginia" -- since Case and Co. were supposed to be the upstarts in Dockers, and TW the honchos in pinstripes, it made for an easy lead: The tables had been turned.

Meanwhile, anyone who has ever spent time at AOL's headquarters just outside Dulles Airport in Virginia knows that a lot of the men there still dress like Steve from "Blue's Clues," and that late in the day the Nerf balls still fly (though the beer busts are mostly a thing of the past). Casual attire can be seen at Time publications on days other than Friday -- though casual there still generally means polo shirts tucked in and "be sure to iron those jeans, mister."

But AOL never exactly swung, mind you; they weren't some bohemian Silicon Alley start-up with counterintuitive design and guess-what-I'm-talking about content. For years, in fact, Case was derided as a square, the man least likely to succeed on the bleeding edge of the World Wide Web. The execs there were into golf, for chrissakes, as noted by Michael Wolff in his amusing chapter on AOL in "Burn Rate": "... this game of the 1950s corporation was the official pastime, even obsession, of this self-styled first corporation of the twenty-first century."

Time, in magazine terms, was emblematic of that '50s corporation Wolff invokes. If the man in the gray flannel suit had worked in magazines, it would have been one of Time's. The "Velvet Coffin" was so called not just because the company's perks and bennies were on a par with or better than anyone else's but because some editors and executives actually never left. On the 34th floor of the company's headquarters on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan (right across the street from that other monument to unchanging entertainment, Radio City Music Hall) were Time's famous "Aloha Suites," executive offices for men (always men) whose usefulness was played out before their contracts had expired. You could glance in, see a secretary, a sofa, maybe even a little putting green in the corner with artificial turf -- but no executive.

"All of that started changing more than 10 years ago," according to one Time Inc. veteran I spoke to, "even before the Warner merger in 1990. There were more Jews in the building, for one. And years ago the very fact that you were a senior editor automatically meant you had a liquor budget; you had a cabinet in your office that was refilled once a month with liquor."

The influx of women (not to mention sobriety) changed that culture over the years. "It's part of what happened in society, too," the writer continued. "There were no longer quite as many folks who felt the need for three-martini lunches; more editors wanted to go home and see their kids."

More important, the tolerance for deadwood and coasters decreased as well. Though there may still be a few execs with ersatz jobs on floor 34, most everyone else is hustling to compete -- and stay afloat. "In the old days the managing editor would change, but everyone would keep their jobs," said this longtimer, "while at any other magazine you would assume new editor, new photo editor and so on. That now happens at Time Inc., too." The free ride is becoming a thing of the past. A couple of years ago an edict came down from on high: "No more passing the trash." Translation? "You couldn't take the editor or writer you thought was pretty lousy and shunt them off to another magazine."

AOL has not been around long enough to gather much moss -- though I've met a few of its employees who've been hard pressed to tell me exactly what they do. "Any notion of AOL as this nimble little start-up is kind of behind the curve," said someone I spoke to who has worked for both AOL and Time Warner. "It's been a big company for a long time and can be as stodgy as anybody."

This person worked at Time in the '80s "when the culture was changing over from the good-old-boy network where they rolled out the drink carts and you could take dial cabs to the Hamptons and they were instituting sobriety courses for executives," and had smelled the velvet inside the coffin. "AOL had a similar reputation," he recalled of the '90s, "but for completely different reasons: The options were so good and the stock was so lucrative and the brand was so established that nobody could leave, at least for four years. It was shorter term but it had a digital coffin reputation; if you were hired by AOL nobody could hire you away because no one could offer you enough to leave, whether you liked your job or not."

Workers lulled into complacency do not produce the best work, of course. "One of the complaints you would hear at AOL was of the dead weight," he said, "of people who had lost interest in the company but were just waiting for their options to vest. But we're talking about four years, not 40." And because of the company's phenomenal success in the last four years, a lot of those employees left -- "retired" -- while in their 30s. Still, you don't hear of many people being pushed out of AOL. "They try to take care of people," said this dual veteran. "It's a pretty benign plutocracy. It's not a place that's known for squeezing or crushing people, it doesn't have a reputation like Disney."

Though no spunky start-up, AOL certainly has a more nimble reputation than Time's magazine division. When I asked veterans of the defunct Pathfinder what they were still doing over there, I was told they were working on the launch of InStyle.com. It must be an idea whose time has come, since people at Time were talking to me (and presumably others) about putting In Style online almost three years ago.

"AOL's whole focus is to gain market share and build an audience and deliver services that are built around a customer rather than some other core business," said my veteran of both shops. "Time Warner's idea of using the internet has been trying to leverage their brands into online space. No matter how hard they push it goes back to, 'Well, how does this help what we've got?' Instead of breaking new ground and making new ways of doing business."

You might say that now they don't need to break new ground: They've got AOL to do it for them. But it will be interesting to see if the relatively meteoric AOL can light a fire under Time's blue britches. Can this new company add a sense of urgency to Time's almost glacial method of developing new titles? As things stand now, magazines appear only through sponsorship: People begets In Style and Teen People, Sports Illustrated breeds SI for Kids and so on. "You can't just launch something independently," as one insider put it, "you have to find a mother ship to send out a little ship." Whereas at AOL, at least in the '90s, people flung about ideas to see what might stick. (The chaotic process, well limned by Wolff in his book, fostered a lot of orphans as well, bastards that no one ever shepherded past infancy.)

It could be that the two companies will never significantly interact on a daily basis, that the Time Warner side will just continue to produce content that AOL will feed to its users -- at a high rate of speed, of course, thanks to TW's growing cable-modem network. Indeed, many observers say that this deal was all about cable, similarities (or differences) between the companies be damned. But even if they do end up spending a lot of face time with each other, if the Internet workers of Virginia beat a path to the magazine mavens of Manhattan and vice versa, at least one person who has worked for both doesn't think the cultures will clash.

"They both have a reputation for being pretty full of themselves," he said, "of having that we-are-masters-of-the-world mentality." And the two little dictators needn't fight it out, either; they have more than golf in common. "Steve Case is a pretty preppy guy. We're not talking about someone who sits cross-legged in their living room. They are both mainstream white-bread American brands. It's a good fit culturally.

"When I started working at AOL, it was kind of familiar," he continued. "The organization wasn't that different than what I remember Time Inc. being like, aside from the obvious differences." It was that recognition of something more than success that may have brought them together, like George Bush Sr. picking Dan Quayle out of a field of possible running mates. What he liked in that kid was a reflection of himself.

"That's something about this meshing that almost feels inevitable," said the media veteran. "The two companies started to resemble each other even before the merger. I think somewhere there was a recognition -- 'Oh, yeah!' -- sort of the prodigal son comes home. Except this time the son had the wallet."

I'm home, Dad. Mind if I borrow your tie?