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Time Warner Finds AOL Email Inadequate

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the so-easy-to-use dept.

DragonMagic writes "MSNBC.com carries this article describing the woes at many of Time Warner's companies after AOL's merger, where the internet giant tried to migrate them all to AOL's email services. From crashing software and attachment limits, to missing and misdirected mail, companies such as Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab! Plans are now to retreat from this forced migration and return to the services previously held by each company."

21 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously no one paid attention by wikki · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment. AOL limits the number of messages and attachment sizes. Only lets you save the files in "AOL" format. Folders are limited, and you can't create rules. It is made for the old grandma and grandpa to be able to communicate with their grandkids and send them pictures and other cute little notes. If someone had done just 10 mintues of thinking on this they would have realized the mistake they were making.

    1. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by TedCheshireAcad · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This seems to be a classic example of if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it syndrome. TW's previous system seemed to handle their needs, and after the merger, they switched to AOL? Does anyone see the logic behind this? If you have a system that gets the job done without complaints, don't change it.

      ~my $.02

    2. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by PaschalNee · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >Does anyone see the logic behind this?
      I can see some logic behind it. Rather than maintaining/supporting/upgrading X different systems across the various companies why not standardise on a single system. Now the choice of system to standardise on leaves a bit to be desired but the decision itself was, in my opinion, a sound one.

    3. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by Computer! · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm suprised that they had to migrate back. Since the Conglomerate was using custom software, why didn't they throw some of their umpteen gazillion dollars at the software, and make it work? If the email system is bulletproofed and refined, the benefits could be passed on to AOL's customers, increasing value for the service. It's sad to see them bail out so quickly on eating their own dog food.

      --
      If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
    4. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by billtom · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, I would say that the logic is that any company that could use it's own products and doesn't opens itself up to criticism concerning the quality of said products.

      If the executives at Ford don't drive Ford cars then what does it say about Ford cars? If Microsoft developers don't use Visual Studio, what does it say about Visual Studio? If AOL/TW doesn't use the email system that AOL/TW sells, then what does it say about that email system?

      So when one company buys another the new company has to try to use the products of both companies, regardless of the transitionary costs (e.g. Hotmail and Microsoft server OS).

      The (unforunately named) phrase is "eating your own dogfood".

    5. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by ethereal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm going to coin a phrase:

      "Standardization is the last refuge of an incompetent CIO"

      This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time. All so that we could standardize on Microsoft.

      Hmmm, maybe it's the "Microsoft" part that really makes the CIO "incompetent"?

      I'll grant that there are benefits to standardization, but it seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down; nobody asks the users what they want or even what they need to get their jobs done. So the results satisfy some sort of CIO goals checklist, but the real result is that lots of time at the ground level is wasted. It's like top executives are allergic to feedback that doesn't come from Wall Street sycophants or something.

      --

      Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

    6. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by plague3106 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "So AOL, maker of a fine corporate email system, you run Exchange? Why is that? Doesn't your software work?"

      That can be answered by a) 'Our mail system is intended for home, not business use' or b) 'We have full confidence in it, but there's a system workign in place already, and there are no benefits to be gained by spending the money to switch.'

    7. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Standardization based on protocols and data formats makes sense. Standardizing on =products= does not. Standardizing on products =looks= cost effective but in the long run means that the company becomes slaves to a vendor through lock-in practices. The customer/vendor relationship becomes reversed and the vendor is able to extort tribute from the customer.

      If you standardize on protocols and data formats, you can choose products based on your admin and user skills. When those skills change because of the market, you can change your product and not be forced to support some legacy, proprietary system for which skills are increasingly rare and expensive.

      This is especially important as corporations become larger because skills in one locale may not be the same available in another.

    8. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by ethereal · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Although I somewhat fault our sysadmins (because some of them are Microsoft monkeys and deserve it :) in fact the week-long outage was due to a Global Address List replication bug within Exchange. Perhaps Exchange is as reliable; but the user-perceived reliability of it is that it is a significant downgrade from sendmail (really, I'd like to see a user base which doesn't feel this way after getting stuck with Exchange). It also requires more hardware to service an equivalent user base, leading to higher support costs, etc. and exacerbating the reliability problems.

      So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone. They give you the tools and the resources and it is your job to do it. If you don't understand that you don't have a place in an enterprise environment.

      See, that's the problem - the guys at the top shouldn't be specifying tools at all. They should specify what they want and what they're willing to provide in order to get that done, and let the people that know what they're doing pick the tools that work properly. If people who don't know what they're doing pick the tools, then sometimes it becomes impossible for those with the know-how to get the job done with the tools they're given. And unfortunately blame usually rolls downhill, which is another truism of how large corporations work.

      Top-down works great for setting goals and expectations. It does not work great for creating excellent technical solutions. Especially if there's a lot of micro-management and politics concerning those technical solutions.

      The reality is that employees at a large company are the customers of IT, just the same way that an ISP or a web site might have external customers. But since the inside of the company is a feudal estate, employees get the shaft on the IT front with disturbing regularity. Employees put up with internal IT failures that would drive actual paying customers away in droves. But when you're top-down, you don't have to worry about annoying metrics like "user-perceived reliability", I guess.

      --

      Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

  2. No Real Suprise Here by lysurgon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've always been somewhat mystified at the way AOL has been able to sell inferior services (slow service, high downtime, poor chat/email feature) to millions of users. Testiment to the power of marketing I suppose. On the other hand, that "community" stuff is a real thing...

    Of course, now that they're in the business arena where a few hours of downtime means more than wating till tomorrow to send that email to grandma, and lo and behold they just can't cut it. MSN has the same problems. No credible business can put up with their downtimes and outages.

    Now the executive level is beginning to understand how important these issues are. Someone could make a nice bundle of money by creating a credible business-class isp that doesn't suck (e.g. worldcom... generation d? yeah right).

    --


    Howard Dean for president
  3. I thought that AOL was... by cnelzie · · Score: 3, Insightful


    ...designed for the consumer market, not the corporate market. So, it really is no wonder that it was simply found to be inadequete for the needs of the corporate users.

    Of course, it probably didn't help that the reputation of people with the following addresses. (You know there is that stigma about people that use AOL.) :

    Editor_in_Chief_Time@aol.com

    Technology_Correspondent_Time@aol.com

    Enough of the fun though. This problem is not an isolated incident with AOL. This type of thing is how most large businesses are run. Someone high-up gets this hairbrained idea and then pushes it through. Regardless of how inadequete the technology is and how difficult the transition can be.

    I work in a situation similar to that right now. It used to be that the outlying vendors, of this major corporation, used to interact with ordering replacement units, checking on warranty status and recieving corporate memos through a satellite connection on dumb terminals.

    Now, someone has gotten the bright idea that they need to change from dumb terminals, to having full blown MS Windows machines running a web browser to perform those same tasks. These days, the time to perform the simplest task takes nearly three times what it used to (For both relearning and simply downloading nearly one hundred times the old amount of data.)

    The other major problem is, instead of dumb terminals that the end-users are unable to fiddle with. They now have MS Windows machines that they are responsible to maintain, which is the farthest thing from their mind.

    To them, the new stuff is hard, slow and a royal pain in the rear.

    Unfortunately, someone got a bug in their rear to push forward this great new technology. So, that is what is happening. I can see them going back to the way it used to be in about 5 to 10 years, after they "recoup" the losses in development and find out how much money it is going to cost them to have phone support staff handle the call volume.

    --
    .sig seperator
    --

    --
    If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
  4. What I'd like to know is... by tswinzig · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?

    Mail being lost, large attachments not allowed, being classified as a 'spammer' if you BCC to too many people... that sounds like a problem with AOL's mail servers. But the article seems focused on AOL's use of their new Netscape products (presumably NS 6.x), which doesn't really jive with the complaints in the article...

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
  5. Re:Look who is talking... by Pfhreakaz0id · · Score: 3, Insightful

    whoever the F&*(! modded this up needs their privs revoked.

    1. They not only didn't read the article (it says Wall Street Journal), the ADMITTED it in the post.

    2. It's really clever to use an "$" instead of S in MS right? Huh? Get it?

    3. Everyone knows MSNBC has been lauded for being a surprisingly unbiased source for news about Microsoft anyway. Much better than, say, ZDnet.

    Get a clue.

    --
    DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
  6. Re:Bad Time Warner. by Chundra · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well AOL and Time-Warner are part of one big happy family now. So it's not in their best interests to go suing eachother.

    If you're a troll, I'm insightful.

  7. Why not use Netscape Messaging Server? by colaboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    AOL owns Netscape, whose messaging server has been used by several fortune 500 companies and very large ISPs. I'd be surprised if AOL had the kind of troubles being reported if it were to use the technology available right under its own nose.

  8. E-mail for magazine proofs and large files? by willith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not sure which is worse--that the employees were forced to use AOL e-mail at work, or that top level people at Time were using e-mail to send final page proofs that were apparently of a massive size.

    Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?

  9. Re:Look who is talking... by linuxpng · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Except the big problem is that MSNBC is running the article now. How did this get modded up?

  10. AOL vs Microsoft Mail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So AOL couldn't get Netscape Mail to work with AOL mail servers? They should continue to eat their own dog food until they get this right. The AOL client isn't suitable for corporate use, but AOL's Netscape mail client should be.

    Hmmm, there's a rumor that AOL is testing a new version of its software with the Netscape client for possible future release to customers. If this includes the mail client, maybe AOL should rethink these plans.

    Microsoft mail client/server software may not be perfect, but at least Microsoft eats its own email dog food. This puts a minimum limit on the quality of their software.

    Microsoft's competitors like AOL aren't going to make much headway in the market as long as their products are even worse than Microsoft's, no matter how the court case comes out!

  11. Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux? by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux? You know if Linux were to provide a solution it would be a marketing coup. As much as we Open Source folks like to preach to the choir we really do need to make some high profile scores if the public is ever to "get it". Love 'em or hate 'em, AOL is about as high profile as you get regarding John Q Public's awareness of the "Internet".

  12. Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.

    How much you want to bet? It ain't so. They run the AOL client and read mail off the AOL servers, and have ever since AOL migrated off QuickMail around 1989. The problem is not with the AOL mail system per se, but with a total system that just doesn't fit together. See my post above.

    Jay "Chief Architect begins with a capital C too" Levitt

  13. Re:It's not too bad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What AOL does with there email servers doesn't prevent spam, it just makes it inconvient for the average person to send out multiple cc to people. They are a bunch of morons!