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Why Time Warner was Forced Into AOL's Arms
There's a front page story in the Washington Post today about how media giant Time Warner blew it on the Internet despite a huge and expensive company-wide online effort, while AOL, despite many flaws and stumbles, came out of nowhere and became a huge Internet force within five years. This is an excellent cautionary tale of business shifts in what Steve Case calls "the Internet Century."
A lot of people don't CARE for learning about their computers, believe it or not. I know this sounds weird to most of you slashdotters, but its true. My aunt doesn't know how everything is set up on her computer, and she doesn't really care to learn. I set up the Internet for her, so she didn't have to learn, but I know if I wasn't available to help her, she wouldn't go learn how to do it on her own -- she would just get AOL.
People are clueless about different things.
- No traditional corporate executive in America was smart enough then to harness the Internet. Anyone already running a profitable company would be mad to risk the whole thing on an unknown that might cost hundreds of millions of dollars before turning a profit. And if the executive wanted to, he likely would have been fired by the stockholders, management team or board of directors.
Actually that is not quite true, one did. As much as we all love to hate him and his company, he has to be given credit for that.I think that as much as it shows the inability of Bill Gates as and innovator that he was among the last to spot the Internet even from his chair, it shows his brilliance as a bussiness man that he dared turn his company around on a dime. If Time-Warner had had that, they would not have known the fate of Mirabilis, Nullsoft and Netscape today...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The above quote comes from what is probably the most insightful paragraph in the article. AOL was always a loser in everyone's mind! A laughable parody of what an ISP should be, more focused on marketing and on mailing out those damn disks than on providing customer service. Does anyone else remember what happened to Usenet when AOL added a thousand Usenet groups to its own BBS system without explaining to its users what that really meant? The flamewars that followed were legendary...
Yahoo was started by a couple of stereotypical geeks. So was Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Sun and (lets face it) Microsoft. (That is if you give a little leeway to the definition of 'geek'.) But it always seems to be the Marketroids who win in the end...
We geeks change the world because we understand the world's most fundamental source of change: Technology. Sometimes we even understand how and why technology will affect society. But the Marketroids reap the benefits because they understand how to manipulate the masses! They know how to play on fear, greed and sex to sway opinion. We might think ourselves better because we are more 'pure', but that doesn't get us the girls.
Historically this has always been true. Occasionally we remember geeks like Aristotle and Da Vinci, but we tend to point to the Generals, the Kings and the Emperors as the focus of change. Not to the inventors of the technologies they used to create that change or which forced the change upon them. We remember the wars, not the peace. The leaders, not the creative types who designed their palaces and built their weapons.
I truly detest the thought that Steve Case might be remembered as a leader of the "Internet Century". It really chaps my balls! But it seems invetable that names like Torvalds, Berners-Lee, Englebart, Rheingold, Metcalf and (add your favorite geek god here) will, at most, rate no more than a footnote or two. Perhaps there is a way for us to forestall this fate, but first we will have to break the anti-social habits that make us powerless in society at large.
It is an interesting dichotomy: On the one hand the technophiles are the point-source of social change. On the other they are the people least likely to be identified with that change. All because we cannot lie with a straight face. William Gibson put it best -- "The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent."
Jack
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Anyone who hasn't tried one of those infamous AOL floppies should try it some time. Those floppies are the reason AOL dominated. They were entirely self-contained: you didn't need TCP/IP, or even the modem set up. You plugged them in, they figured everything out, and boom! Joe User was online.
Many would like to see Linux be where Windows is. Many have even claimed that Linux is "easier to use than Windows" (which is laughable, but I swear someone claimed it in a post). The lesson here is that the vast majority of people don't care about how the underlying software works. They just want to use the darn thing.
Unfortunately, many Linux advocates worship at the altar of "oooooh, what a beautiful kernel" when the average user says "OK. I see a pretty desktop; what can I do with it?" Unfortunately, in the case of Linux for the average user, not much compared to the applications under Windows.
The lesson is that people will forgive almost endless technical inferiority, but they won't forgive something that is not useful to them. It's all about the content/applications. And until Linux gets at least some applications that are superior to the equivalents in Windows, it will never make any inroads into the desktop world.
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As much as I dislike the interface and services that AOL has, and as much as I dislike the spam that comes from AOL users, I have to admit that the company has grown to it's current size because they are smart at marketing. They saturate prospective customers with free CDs of their software, they have dial-up available everywhere (in and out of the US), and they provide an interface that is very easy for non-computer oriented people to use.
This is a good example of how to win a market. You get a large number of people who don't know how to do something, and provide a way for them to do it easily. They can send e-mail and browse the web (after a fashion), and don't worry about their PPP login scripts or how to configure their mail software to use the proper POP or IMAP server. They don't have to worry about downloading any of the software or whether or not they can install it -- it's simple to use and new copies arrive in the postal mail every month (we use our AOL CDs as coasters).
One person I know told me that the reason she used AOL was because she didn't care to learn anything about being online or the Internet -- she "just wanted to use it." Thankfully, after a few years of using them, she has moved to a normal ISP. She put it "I'm getting annoyed with AOL, so I am phasing it out."
I can see this happening with other people as well. They get "online" via AOL, use it for awhile and "discover the Internet." Then they start to realize that AOL puts a lot of limitations on what they can do on the Internet, so they drop it for a normal ISP service.
In any case, the reason AOL does so well is that they provide an easy entry to basic net services for the millions of people out there who don't want to learn anything about the Internet, but "just want to use it." =(
Jim