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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."

10 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 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

  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. 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?

  8. 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