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The Sinking Ship that is AOL
EyesWideOpen writes "This article at Salon discusses the ways in which AOL is trying to stay afloat, with the release of version 8.0 of it's software, in a time when AOL (which recently merged with Time Warner) has had a string of bad press -- falling stock prices, SEC investigation, etc. -- attached to it's name. One of my favorite quotes from the article says of AOL: ''It was never really an Internet company. AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.'"
Bankruptcy!
Finally people realize......
While we all hate AOL they still do offer the most access numbers out of any other ISP if you do a lot of traveling.
there's alot of non-techies out there that can't see doing anything but AOL. AOL has (at least historically) had the touchy-feel stuff down pat. There's also all the people who don't want to change their email addresses. AOL has more going for it than the person who originated this post thinks.
Is it really possible for AOL to go out of business? Sure, they suck, and they've been losing a great deal of their consumer base, but they are still the single largest commercial ISP in the US. Time-Warner, if anything, would sooner split up AOL into smaller regional ISP's than bankrupt it, I would believe.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Served its purpose for me.. I used the startup disk long enough to get (and this is in the misty 3.1 Windows days) the software I needed for my dialup, and never touched it again. I would just as soon see it go away.. think of all the letter carriers who would be able to work longer with not carrying that crap around!
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
"Good-bye"
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
...but including Mozilla in 8 isn't gonna help. They don't have the power any more to make a major switch like this. IF they actually do include Mozilla in their latest version, it's gonna leave a lot of new users scratching their heads as to why half of AOL (ie: the web) doesn't work. They definately need to delay trying to introduce Mozilla until they're more stable, financially. Rocky times are generally not a good time to be experimenting with new things.
Poor, poor AOL. I feel so sorry that they are doing bad. Yeah, right. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
My family used to use AOL at the rate of $23.95 a month, plus any phone charges that we incurred. When signing my apartment up for Ameritech DSL, they had a special going on - for one year, the price would be $30/month! For $7 more a month, we'd get a free DSL modem, free install, etc. etc. What an amazing deal! I don't know why Ameritech didn't advertise it more, but any family who has a teenage son or daughter that can install DSL can easily be stolen away from AOL - AOL simply can't charge as much as it does for what little it gives.
Not really sensical arguments, but when they start giving answers like that it's hard to get through.
Also, where I work, one of our techs had AOL before starting here. Even after having our dial-ups (free) and our T1, he still kept his AOL for a year or two - would even connect to it over our T1 connection.
Must be nicotine levels or something addictive.
The sinking ship that is Salon writing about the sinking ship that is AOL.
the scary part is that some of these ppl are jumping on to MSN. thus giving microsoft another place to monopolize and passport will grow.
AOL, whether you hate them or not, is the primary (some might say only) obstacle preventing Microsoft from owning the Internet. If they were to go away, "MSN" and "The Internet" would become synonymous. Is that what you want?
I don't think I could stand to live in that kind of world. I hope AOL retains its huge lead forever.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
But they do have better focus on ease-of-use than almost any software company out there. Hasn't anyone here tried to talk people away from AOL? I have, and they won't leave. It's almost as though they... like it.
314-15-9265
It was never really an Internet company.
That can't be right! The AOL tech I had helping me troubleshoot a cable-modem connection told me unequivocally that AOL is the Internet.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I hope that AOL's woes don't tear down Time/Warner which has many great media properties that will be scattered to the winds if AOL needs to gin up some cash. Over the weekend, I heard analyst say that if AOL had not purchased Time/Warner, the Time/Warner stock would be around $40 and AOL would be around $4. Right now, AOL is at $11.89. I wonder if former Time/Warner stock holders feel like idiots for approving the merger.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I thought AOL was based on the idea that people need a never-ending supply of drink coasters.
If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.
Especially now that no one has any money to spare on AOL pleasantries like half-assed chatroom censorship and 50% of bandwidth going to ads, AOL is dying. Expect A0L to lose more ground over the coming months... considering their future next to cable and DSL access, for all intents and purposes AOL is dead.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Then why do they continue to be the #1 service provider in the US?
when most non geeks think of aol they think of an "easy internet expirience", although most of them don't even know what internet is. they use aim, they use aol email and they don't want to go any further, hell they don't even know there is more than aol. such people don't care about the speed or price because they don't use it too often.
as long there are still enough computer illiterate aol will stay.
and as long as aol funds the mozilla team and winamp, it should stay - it is still the lesser evil.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I kind of like having their free cd's to throw around.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
This may be a last ditch effort to get the AOL side of the business profitable, before splitting back into two seperate companies again. I don't think anyone thinks that this merger was a good idea in the first place.
AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.
I though AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS that people could use, in the days of Prodigy and Compuserve, well before the Internet was remotely available to Joe 486.
...
Just because it ceases to be the #1 ISP out there doesn't mean it should die. Perhaps scale back some of the overly wasteful advertising methods and you'll end up with a successful, if not overwhelmingly so, business. Not that I like AOL, but it's just rediculous to think that it has to be top dog or dead. Scale it back, let it stick around as just another ISP, it'll stay in profitable by name recognition alone.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
I'm sorry, but that sounds exactly right to me. I still remember when I first went online. It was through AOL. Why? Because they were the only easy way to get online at the time. Any idiot could pull a CD out of their mailbox and be online within hours.
That was the first instant chat that I'd ever seen. It was a GUI IRC, which has a lot of pluses to it. It was basically the first internet that most people could use without having a whole lot of background in the area.
Now fast forward 10 years.
Now you've got everyone and their Uncle working as an ISP. Most companies have usable products to get online. The internet is a much friendlier place, it's pretty, it's readable, not nearly as much tech speak on the pages. It's become another form of TV. (or at least it's trying to)
The biggest problem is that you don't NEED AOL anymore. They are great to get started, like diapers. Then you grow up and move on. AOL's problem is that less and less people need hand holding to get online, as that's gotten easier. At the same time they face some stiff competition, and the pool of brand new users is drying up.
They need to figure out a way to get some fresh meat to stock their coffers.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned much in the mainstream press, but here in the DC area AOL is aggressively hiring software engineers with Linux/Perl/CGI/database experience for their "internal" functions. One would suppose that this will reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of their back-office functions, after they fire all those MSCE's that run around doing the retry/reboot/reinstall cycle on their current internal network of MS machines.
they have a very simple problem, they got all the marketshare they are going to get and the market isn't growing enough either. And there business model seems based on perpetual growth. They really just need to keep costs down and keep there existing customers for stable revenue.. Plus, I think they are losing young people with their business practices. I'd like to see some hard numbers, but that is my impression.
Why do these companies get to the top of the pile and not realize when to stop climbing?
Sure I think AOL sucks. However, the fact of the matter is that my grandparents wouldn't be be on the internet if it weren't for AOL. They wouldn't have been able to see pictures of their newest grandaughter just hours after she was born, since she lives in Germany. They wouldn't be able to talk to us via IM without aol, anything else would be too difficult to use. I imagine they'll get there eventually though.
I am sure that there was a time when you have used AOL. For a lot of people that don't know much about the internet and computers, AOL is their world. Sure it is annoying, but imagine what it would be like without AOL?
Simultaneously, the company is hoping that broadband users will need the same kind of handholding that its masses of dial-up devotees once thrived on.
Hah! Somehow I doubt that's going to happen.
However, the article goes on to make that same point. Analysts blame AOL's poor broadband showing on the fact that the service is a bit more expensive than competitors' systems, and on what's called a "mature market," by which they mean that people interested in DSL are too sophisticated for AOL.
So, it looks bad for AOL.. That's good.. However, like it or not, they did play a big role in the massive acceptance of Instant Messaging software. Sure they were far from the first, and far from the best, and they totally missed the boat when they wouldn't let other software clients bounce messages of their servers, but they were the biggest for a while, and they played a key role...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
What was left to me was AOL, so I signed up for that 1025 hours, and then did some shopping around online for another internet provider... I eventually ended up with a wireless internet service provider that uses the Motorola Canopy system, which gives me sustained performance comparable to a decent cable or DSL service, plus even more nice things like static IP and RDNS allocation.
Needlessly to say, then it was "Goodbye, AOL!" ... "The call" was pretty funny to me, since I had (ab)used their service to leap to a competitor. The rep on the other end tried in vain to convince me to keep my AOL account, and even tried to use the argument that "a dynamic ip is good because it's more secure." I got tired in the end and basically told him to cut the crap and just cancel my account.
I'll admit it, I subscribe to AOL. (Internet acces only, of course) As a true geek (tm, perhaps I should be thrown in stocks and pilloried. Truth is there are LOTS of people out there who need training wheels, permanent training wheels. Personally I got deathly sick of [unable to display image] when my AOL friends didn't understand the differenct between embedding and attaching. Now those folks can send me stuff without me having to do lecture on attacments.
People of my parents generation often don't have the technical understanding to setup and use more complicated solutions. Instead they buy a 'computer as appliance' and slap on M$N (shudder) or AOL, and learn that instead of trying to understand all the layers involved.
The GUI is challenging enough, let alone configuring the network, setting up IMAP, trying to figure out why the modem script doesn't work, figuring out which ISP to use, and navigating support mazes to figure out what's really wrong.
What they really want is a way to get connected to their children where they can send pictures, and exchange notes. AOL and MSN, and even Earthlink do that for them as package deals.
It may not be the cheapest, but they're not poor, and they'd rather spend their time fishing, cooking, and hanging with their friends, than upgrading their DSL driver to version 2.8.
It's long been an easy way for the clueless to get online with a minimum of pain or actually having to learn anything. I definitely plan to get my mother online via AOL so I can pawn her whiny phone calls off on the poor AOL staffers who are paid to deal with the functionally computer illiterate. It's what they're there for. Since there will always be newbies and the terminally cluefree, there will always be a market for products like AOL. It's ultimate niche may not be the massive media-infotainment-merchandising one-stop shop that they've aspired to, but it they focus on their original & enduring strenth, they will remain viable, although much reduced.
;)
Besides, while they do open the floodgates for any idiot to get online, put up a cheesy webpage, and harass the knowledgeable, they also make it easier to set up filters for my hotmail account. I have all aol.com addy's blocked.
"C"
AOL always had the easiest access... to a cd with their software on it.
I'm sure the CEO and numberous other people on the advisory board know of the problems at AOL and if there is anyway they could reverse them they would try to change the face of the company and evolve it for a different era on the Internet. AOL might be a half way house, but how about an option for more "advanced" users so that they can choose weather or not they want any of the bubble-gum gui that is the aol interface. Doesn't AOL now offer broadband services? Do you have to use their interface to access the Internet? How about an option for aol so that you can just keep your e-mail address for say $5 a month? If AOL was intelligent they would be coming out w/ new "innovative" services to keep their ship afloat, which I don't expect will sink anytime soon.
We could all benefit from my education.
Don't start flaming me immediately. I'm a techy EE and I never use AOL. But my girlfriend (who is a non-geek...she's a lawyer) has used it for years and loves it. For all its flaws, its easy to use, has tons of great features, and is surprisingly good at self-healing (i.e. fixing broken installs, etc).
Having said that, ever since I've started showing her news blogs, free email, Yahoo, Amazon, etc., she's been using AOL less and less.
Anyway the vast majority of AOL users were idiots and I was truly embarrased by having a @aol.com in my email address when posting to a unix usenet group for obvious reasons. Anyway I switched as soon as the internet boomed and I could finally pick a good ISP. I figured aol would slowly die as the internet became more popular.
The only true benifit of AOL was that everything was centrally organized and you did not have to search to find specific information. However yahoo now has groups that relate to about ever interest known to man and the search engines have improved and can be catagorized.
Anyway it seems the only true benifit of AOL is IM and chat.
The internet is truly a superior platform now and the world runs on it. Its time aol became a portal like yahoo and an isp. THey can no longer have two different online platforms. Its expensive to maintain and the AOL network is the dying platform while the internet is the one thats growing and standard.
http://saveie6.com/
What, AOL go under?
*cough*QuantumLink*cough*
Wouldn't be the first time, thats all I'm saying.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
If MSN wins, then IE wins (or has it?)
I'm tired of coding for the crap that is MS's constantly changing browser standards. I have a web app that works on Netscape 6.x and higher as well as the Mozilla's that spawned them and other Gecko based browsers. However, it only works on IE 5.5. It won't work on 5.0 because the JavaScript and DOM are incomplete and 6.0 renders pages horribly.
If IE is to be the standard, then there will be NO standard.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Does that mean that they will **finaly** stop sending me all those "new and improoved" CD's? Im gonna miss those coasters.
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
I suspet that the number of free hours given out by AOL accounts for millions of dollars each month in 'lost' revenue.
I agree with your original comments about how AOL has the touchy feely stuff down pat. They have huge customer service departments to answer questions when the like "how do I send a picture through e-mail" and so on. I have worked in small home-based businesses selling custom computers and internet access and frankly, support is the most troublesome part of it because most users just don't get it. Although I eschew AOL internet and pre built PCs (dell, gateway, etc) for myself, I must unfortunately recommend such solutions for clueless users because it's the only way they're going to get support for answering stupid questions because the people who run small businesses that ship better products don't have the time or money of all of that.
Aside from my skepticism about AOL needing saving (since they are the biggest ISP out there, I understand), the challenges they face would be easy to deal with.
(1) Create a straight PPP dialup product, comes with a modern mail client and web browser (hey! Nescape/Mozilla might work...).
(2) Charge $5-7 per month LESS than current subscription rates. Yep, $15-$18 per month range.
So now, they have a streamlined faster product for those who want it, available at a competetive price. Meanwhile, there's still the implication that there is value added for the whole AOL package (which there probably is, speed issues and pop-ups aside), and they can still sell to users who like those features and/or need the training wheels. Simple and appealing. They might even get new users.
(And anybody who says ??? and PROFIT!! deserves to be the next sniper victim. Don't go there. It's not funny anymore.)
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I used to, and still do, consider AOL the equivalent of "Internet for Dummies". It was the first ISP, if you can call it that, that I had. Then I desired the real internet and cut them loose. Now, even thought I pretty much loath the service and their stereotypical user, I understand that AOL still has the greatest benefit of being EASY. This is their greatest asset. There are professionals out there that know how to use their PC, but barely know how to configure it. They may have the intellect to figure it out, but when their time is more valuable than the guy at Best Buy, then why should they bother? (Not to mention, it keeps the guy at Best Buy employed)
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
If AOL goes away then it's going to get a lot harder to filter illiterate cretins out of e-mail, websites, IRC, etc.
Note: I'm not saying that all AOL users are cretins, just that most cretins on the internet seem to get there through AOL.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Check out his AOL Member Profile's personal quote...
"We're all pioneers in building this new interactive medium, which someday will be as important as TV or the phone. It is an exciting time -- and we should all share it. Please tell everyone about AOL, so they can join us on the electronic frontier."
That's the problem you see. AOL still thinks the internet is still new and people haven't found a place for porn yet.
If only they would have nixed their Ad campaign sending out 400 million floppy disks (followed by 100 million CD's) they would be rolling in dough...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
So I found her an (half the price) ISP, showed her how to do email, surf the web, etc.
One week later, "I'm switching back."
Reason?
It's not pretty . And she missed the voices .
I know!
I am obliged to mention that my SIL is not an idiot.
Unfortunately if AOL goes belly up it will be harder to seperate the idiots from the masses of online users. Atleast when they were on AOL they had the .aol tagged to the end of their email addy so you could easily tag them as cattle and not waste your time discussing things with them hoping for an intelligent converstaion..now they will be amoung us and look no different than you or I.
I'm starting to lose count. It seems like every 6 months or so, the ad blitz starts. "New AOL Version x.0!! Now easier to use than ever! No wonder it's #1!!" It's been just like that EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I think their marketing needs a kick in the pants. I think people are getting numb to the rapid release of new AOL versions. I mean, have there been any real earth-shattering features between these "major" releases?
(Disclaimer: I once had an AOL account. I used my free 5 hours (Yes! FIVE HOURS! Not the 1025 hours they advertise now) back on my old 286 using their pretty cool DOS client that used GEOS. After the 5 hours were up, I promptly cancelled my account. They actually allowed you to cancel online back then! I also was a user of the proto-AOL service, PC-LINK.)
Well, I have about as much respect for Steve Case as I do for Leonardo DiCaprio. I say let 'em sink!
Will SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt be the voice of The Iceberg?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Besides the continuity of e-mail address issue, I think some oldtimers got onto AOL at a time where its content was probably comparable to the neat stuff available on free websites--and for some, that's a reason to stay. For instance, when you're part of a message board community, if the only gateway to that is AOL, you might not want to change. (My cousin's family falls in this group I think, connecting to AOL over their able modem.) I don't know how the other content rates. I still see "AOL keyword:" in a surprisingly large (i.e. not zero) number of places, but I don't know if there's much content that isn't mirrored on a 'normal' web site.
Another small feature that AOL has that (as far as I know) isn't emulated with many other ways of connecting to the Net: multiple screennames. This lets family members keep their own IDs, or lets people play with multiple personaes. I guess nowadays you could do the same kind of thing with free webmail, but still. (My own online identity is now very tied in with the domains I run...if not for those, hell, I might still be on my old academic account as my canonical email.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah right, and sunking on a little proyect formerly known as pengaol will surely help them stay afloat
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
How would we spot all the n00bs without their @aol.com addresses?
I believe AOL is the latest victim of another Microsoft onslaught. It happened with Netscape (ironic isn't it?), it' happening with Palm, and it's now happening with America Online.
AOL 8.0 and MSN 8.0 are just being released now, and MSN looks like a serious contender with some great features. They are growing at a much faster rate than AOL, and AOL's feeling the heat. It just shows the relentlessness of MS and their must-win corporate culture.
Time and time again we've seen this, hopefully AOL will adopt an attitude like MS if they wish to succeed in the long run.
%s/it\'s/its/g
The possesive form "its" NEVER TAKES AN APOSTROPHE. It just doesn't. I know, it's a strange rule, sort of an exception, but it's the convention that literate folk have agreed on.
Every time you throw one of those in, it's like a speed bump on a freeway. The whole purpose of punctuation and grammatical convention in writing is to allow the most seamless transition possible from your head to the page/screen and thereupon the the reader's head. Don't keep flinging the typographical equivalent of ossified dog turds at the lawn mower of my mind.
OK, mod this down and get it over with.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
... the company is taking its cue from TV and offering scheduled content in AOL 8.0 -- programming offered at specific times on specific days. "Not only do I need to be online because that's where my friends are and because I've got to check my e-mail," says AOL's Kimball, "but also because it's Tuesday night, when there'll be new artists online, and Thursday is movie review night. We're creating a model where I've got to be online Saturday morning, I've got to be there on Sunday night. I really think we're creating this pattern through the week where you feel like there's value in all of the time online."
In other words, they're trying to turn at least their corner of the internet into a place for mindless sheep to go and absorb whatever 'programming' AOL wants to give em? What on earth do they mean by 'value in all the time online'?! One of the things I hate most about tv is that it demands you pay attention when the networks want you to; why would we want the internet to be like that? What AOL really means, seems to me, is that they're creating value for themselves by forcing people to play by their schedules. After all, when content is on the web isn't just as valuble--in fact, immeasurably more valuable--if it's there all the time?
Also, I love it that the article quotes the guy who writes 'AOL for Dummies.' Heh.
It was never really an Internet company. AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.'
I don't think this analogy is fair. AOL is definitely an Internet company, it's just that their "online presence" is so huge that they can justifiably call themselves their own little Internet (so to speak) even though none of their content is really available to the general Internet community. Hundreds of other Internet companies have tried to do with web sites what AOL has done with their business, namely the ultimate portal. Even the most successful of these attempts (e.g. Yahoo!, MSN, Netscape) has no where near the content, usability, and breadth that AOL has achieved through their proprietary software and business partnerships. No one advertises Yahoo! keyword "The WB".
I ditched AOL years ago but AOL does honestly have an interface to and navigation context with an enormous amount of general content which cannot be rivaled by anyone else.
paying $20/month comes out to $700 million per MONTH!
Am I doing my math wrong? How much does it cost to run a brain-dead ISP these days?
Why aren't they rolling around in cash? Sounds like they are in perpetual "start-up" mode and can't let the business model take root. Otherwise, they really would have $10 billion a year in revs just from AOL.
Is someone making them pay to build the landfills to hold all the free CD's?
Watch those AOL commercials and when you see old people and young kids with a smile on their face when they get mail it's cuz they know it's pron.
Perhaps shareholders aren't happy, but screw 'em. Why should a company be considered a "failure" if it doesn't rake in gonzo billions? If you can make money, pay your employees decently, and you have happy customers, you are not a failure - despite whatever Wall Street jerky boys in their pinstripe monkey suits would have you believe. How did it come to pass that world domination is our only criteria for success?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Every time I see those damn free CD's, the amount of free time goes up. The last time I saw them I think it was 1250 hours, which has probably gone up by now. Give it another year or two, and it will be something like "6 decades free!".
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
AOL also has IMO pretty bad account creation issues. I spoke with them on Sunday regarding a charge on my credit card. It seems that someone signed up for AOL in July using my credit card number. However, they did not use my name, my address or even my current state of residence.
Most web sites have better credit card fraud prevention, than AOL has for creating accounts. The guy on the phone asked me, "Do you know anyone named Jennifer?"
Anyway, couple that with the fact that it is so easy for people to use AOL for free as an ISP (via the trial) they have got to be bleeding money.
I don't think AOL will ever go away. But I think they have reached the bottom. They should clean up their act.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
If you click on the big "8.0" ad on the right of www.aol.com right now, you'll get the option to download the 8.0 client.
I haven't tried this (it wouldn't make much sense, since I'm on linux and it's unlikely to work) but the system requirements still indicate that IE5.0+ is required (and the Windows 98/2000 requirements actually talk about the disk space required increasing if IE6 has to be installed). That suggests to me that even 8.0 still doesn't run Gecko as the embedded browser.
Can any AOL subscribers here confirm this? Like, for example, seeing what it does with sites where Mozilla and IE are known to give different behavior?
Stuart.
On a more cynical side, they also offer an easy way to identify people that you don't want to associate with.
But seriously, they do offer a good product to a group of people that need that product. If people realized that they were stupid, and stayed with someone that catered to stupid people, the rest of our experiences would actually be better.
Think of all the tech support people that would have to know more than how to read a script. Think of all the bandwidth that you'd have on your broadband connection with granny watching all her flash sites on some one elses network.
I think they should continue to market themselves the way they have, even if the implication is that it is a "halfway house". Not just because I am a pretentious prick, but I think the newbies are better served by a company that is developed to serve them.
Just think how much better MS would be if they either a) didn't try to make their enterprise software able to be run by a PHB, or b) only made nice interfaces. You would have a really good server (and you know you would) or a really good desktop. Now you just have halfassed servers that only rubes can figure out.
That's Funny, Salon trades at .01 and they are commenting on someone elses viability and business plan.
Steve Case made a brilliant move with Time Warner. He used his hyper inflated stock value to buy a company with real sustainable assets. Sure they have experianced massive deflation, just like ALL internet related stocks. But they now have enourmous resources and infrastructure to leverage.
AOL is not for geeks, it's for new users, non-techies and grandma's. And there are a lot of Grandma's out there.
Correct me if I'm wrong..
But AOL is really stuck in 56K while the world of emerging broadband and dsl is here.
To break the AOL mold, they need to keep the online community... allow you to use whatever browser, and offer broadband speeds for the same price. (or comparable).
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
They could simply just start giving away more hours for free.
Maybe 1,000,000 free hours*!
* for the first month only...
"Its" as a possessive doesn't take an apostrophe. That's not "sort of an exception," it's not anything weird that you have to specially remember... it's just the ordinary application of the same rule that applies to many other words!
"Its" as a possessive is a possessive pronoun, like "his", "her", "my", and "your". None of those words have apostrophes in them. We don't say "hi's", "he'r", "m'y", or "you'r" (okay, some people say "you're" when they mean "your", but they're wrong). Apostrophes are used in possessives when we're making a possessive out of a name (proper noun), as in "Joe's Garage", but "it" is not a proper noun. It's a pronoun, and pronouns never take apostrophes when they form possessives.
I suspet that the number of free hours given out by AOL accounts for millions of dollars each month in 'lost' revenue.
Does AOL Time Warner "lose" more revenue from free months of AOL service than it loses from piracy of Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, and Warner Bros. Records products?
Will I retire or break 10K?
30 million users strong? It's about as dead as the French language.
..your fifteen minutes are up---GOODBYE. Asshats.
AOL = Great for beginners Aol = Hell for Novices AOL IM = not baaaaaad
I'm pretty sure that all of the ISP's out there own only the metaphorical last mile of the connection. The primary structure of the internet is primarially payed for (and maintained) by _large_ institutions such as universities, government departments, and very large corporations. I don't think that my DSL ISP ran fiber to the next town over. I think that none of the ISPs actually run the fiber that your data goes on from city to city.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I've never found a site that doesn't work with Mozilla.
There are hundreds. For a sample, go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and type the word deny into the search field.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall2000/McAtee
AOL simply finds itself in the position many online services found themselves in with the advent of the WWW, without an actual raison d'etre, and managed, somehow, to reposition themselves as the "hallway" where others failed to do the same.
So while I believe the author is correct in that they're fighting a battle they will ultimately lose, the premise that they somehow positioned themselves for this is faulty.
They were originally based on the premise that *ordinary* people would pay for online services, and for a number of years were the *only* such service available to such ordinary people.
The "Information Superhighway" didn't happen to be built throught their "town," nor was its future existence predictable in the first place. Much as many ghost towns in the midwest were "created" by the particular route the railroad companies happened to pick, such railroad companies not being predictable when the towns were founded a century before on perfectly solid river routes.
KFG
Good bye and good riddance! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
There is a lot of precedent for people willing to pay for "premium" services. For example, I'm more than willing to pay for my cable TV service, even though I can get "free" TV by putting up an antenna. If AOL can find sources of unique content that make it worth having, then they might have a shot at being the Cable TV of the Internet.
So far, however, there's not much that I'm aware of that is unique to AOL that is so valuable that it makes me run out and get it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If they stopped sending out AOL CDs (market saturation is pretty high now, not like back in 1997), they'd save a bundle.
Just a couple of cents-less sense.
What's this Submit thingy do?
With the exception of #2, those reasons are all very valid ones.
1. Paying double for broadband simply isn't an option for some people on a budget.
2. Granted, a bit uninformed...
3. I have switched e-mail addresses several times in the last year and I couldn't possibly know how many e-mails I have missed due to people still sending to my old accounts.
4. Like it or not, there are people who aren't comfortable with changing things from "the way it is now".
You have no grounds accusing people of being nonsensical just because YOU think their concerns are trivial.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Salon is calling AOL a sinking ship? At stock prices below a dime ($.06 actually) they have no room to talk.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
I dont understand, I see a lot of messages here saying that people dont want to switch from AOL because they dont want to change their e-mail address. If that's the case, maybe AOL is doing something right that we have been overlooking all this time. I can't imagine not changing my E-Mail address regularly enough that it be considered a regular event. does AOL really have spam under that much control?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The real problem with AOL is price. $23.90 for a dialup account. Even if you just wanted access to their content, BYOA is $14.95 a month. Even yearly accounts don't save you much: $239.40.
;)
Most ISP's yearly plans are under $150. A few ISP's are $9.95 a month for dialup. You might give up the ability to travel with it and always have an access # handy, but it's hard to justify paying 2 1/2 times as much for their content which mainly consist of abusive chatrooms with l3m3rs, being spammed and marketed to constantly, and polls asking about your pets.
On the positive side: You can travel just about anywhere and still get access. Their falling customer base did finally solve that problem of users getting disconnected repeatedly.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
And they are happy with that. Computers are not the end all, be all of life that they are to some of the people here. These other people prefer to go out golfing, take the kids to ball games or whatever, then just come home, take 5 minutes to check email, and then turn off the computer. They are the majority of internet users out there, and they are why AOL will likely never fold.
As far as I'm concerned AOL is nothing but a bunch of criminals. Nothing but shady business deals, cooked books, and corrupt executives.
I've had the "pleasure" of dealing with them many times over the years in various partnerships, etc with some former clients. Believe me, I've seen what goes on in that company, its enough to make Enron look like a saint.
The only difference is that somehow AOL managed finagle a deal with Time Warner which made them appear to be a legitimate business.
Its like the Mafia buying up legitimate companies so they can hide the criminal nature of the organization.
email sent by Robert Hughes, disgruntled Time art critic, to AOLTimeWarner macher Gerry Levin, quoted by Tina Brown:
How can I convey to you the disgust which your name awakens in me begins Hughes to LevinThe merger with Warner was a catastrophe. But the hitherto unimagined stupidity, the blind arrogance of your deal with Case simply beggars description. How can you face yourself knowing how much history, value and savings you have thrown away on your mad, ignorant attempt to merge with a wretched dial-up ISP? . . . I dot know what advice you have to offer, but I have some for you. Buy some rope, go out the back, find a tree and hang yourself. If you had any honour you would.Seems like some of the Time Warner employees are feeling some strong emotions about their management's attempt to hitch themselves to a sinking ISP...
but when asked why they don't get a cable modem ... they start spouting all sorts of reasons such as The cost of an ISP
Residential cable Internet access typically does cost $40 per month, which is $16 per month more than AOL(tm) dial-up service currently does.
don't want to loose their e-mail address
Assuming that by "loose" you mean "lose", that's actually a half-legitimate reason. America Online does not provide free forwarding of e-mail from Canceled accounts; that service costs $12 or so per month for "BYOA" (TCP connection to AOL Content(tm) ).
Will I retire or break 10K?
proves greed isn't always good. (And yes they do feel like idiots!)
According to this news story about AOL CD collectors(???), unusual AOL CDs are now selling for more $$$ than AOL stock.
Be afraid.
The Pjammer Chronicles --
Someone else is there to trash the AOL CDs you get in the mail.
This should be modded up as funny. Come on mods!!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
No matter how stupid people are, they don't like being called idiots.
"Only idiots use AOL..."
"well, i use AOL, and I like it, but johnny says only idiots use it, so I will try something else."
This isn't everyone, but quite a few people.
AOL serves a lot of people a very needed service, people that I don't want to have to deal with. I don't have the patience to be a teacher, or a tutor. If people need training wheels to feel comfortable, and I don't have to walk behind them holding them up, then stay on AOL.
I recommend AOL, Dell, and MS Windows to all the people that ask me to help them with "computers". It isn't that I am arrogant or pretentious. These people, generally my family, don't deserve me yelling at them, because I am frustrated with them not getting something I get intuitivly. I recommend the things I recomend because it saves on everyone's stress levels.
Support AOL, if for no other reason than my nerves. (And to keep MSN from market dominance)
MS: Get money from every man, woman and child in the world
AOL: Give every man, woman and child in the world a free 1.44 floppy.
MS: Control the internet
AOL: The internet? What's that.
MS: We own your mail.
AOL: You've got mail...uh....you had mail.
MS: Did we finally get rid of all the MSBOB references on the internet?
AOL: Release AOL V8.
Back in the days when I was an AOL tech support rep (shudder) we had this call tracking database that prompted up solutions for various problems encountered by the user base. It was some sort of knowledge base brain-sharing thing, forget what it was called, and everyone hated it anyway. We all had the ability to submit new call types and solutions. So on my last day there I entered a few in....
...beep... "Sorry, server's down, thank you for calling. Can I interest you in $20 worth of free gas?" ...beep... "Sorry, server's down, thank you for calling. Can I interest you in $20 worth of free gas?" ...beep... "No, you can't have your money back. Can I interest you in $20 worth of free gas?" ... beep... "Sorry, server's down, thank you for calling. Can I interest you in $20 worth of free gas?" ...beep...
This is one of them. For all I know it's still there.
.
.
.
Version: ALL PLATFORMS
Problem Type: Connection -- Modem Dialing
Topic: Other
Symptom: SERVERS DOWN. CALL QUEUE STATUS LIGHT IS SOLID UNWAVERING RED, AS IF 10 MILLION MEMBERS CRIED OUT AT ONCE -- THEN CALLED TECH SUPPORT
Resolution: ABANDON ALL HOPE, GIVE IN TO DESPAIR
Solution: "Sorry, server's down, thank you for calling. Can I interest you in $20 worth of free gas?"
.
.
.
My supervisor got a call from the QA team asking if that was supposed to be a joke or not, if you can believe it.
GMFTatsujin
If you're traveling and need internet access from your motel room, AOL CDs are just the ticket. 1000 free hours for 40 days, no hidden charges, BOOM. You're on the internet in any state in the Union, usually through a local call. Pick up the CDs at any Walmart (read: anywhere in the US) and you're good to go.
I will be sad to see them go for that reason alone. AOL's helped me out for two summers in a row.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Of course AOL is the Internet. So is everything else. The Internet is not centralized, it's a distributed collection of (small i) internet-protocol compatible networks. We (so to speak) are all the Internet.
Heh. I just read a few of the posts here. Lotsa accusations of AOL tricking people into giving them money etc. Going back over the last few days, lots of people have really interesting (and false) ideas about how large companies get big.
Let me give you all a piece of economical trivia: Q.) How does a company get big? A.) A lot of customers pay for a service or product it provides.
It's true for AOL, it's true for Microsoft, it's true for Starbuck's, it's true for Walmart, it's true for Disney, it's true for the RIAA, etc etc etc.
Have these companies done less than ethical stuff to get that way? Sure. Whatever. At some point, people still had to voluntarily give them money. At that same point, most had to be pleased with the service or product.
In other words: You cannot build a business solely on thievery and deceit. You cannot just build a monopoly one day. You cannot just build a coffeeshop next to an existing one and turn on a magic mind beam to make customers zomby-walk into your store. There's something enticicing for them.
AOL's not everybody's favorite ISP. So what? It does it's job. A.) They make it easy for one to get on the net, B.) They offer a price that seems (emphasize SEEMS) reasonable. C.) They don't make the user feel like it's a huge technical challenge to get up and running. There are better deals out that, but that doesn't negate what AOL provides. They didn't get big by playing games with people's credit cards or manipulating minutes or whatever the other overly-creative people have come up with.
Just chill. A corp can't get big by being 100% bastard, 30% is about as high as you can get away with.
anyone remember the superbowl commercial, 30 second long commercial... the first 25 seconds was a busy signal... i forget the message at the end, but it was something like, hate waiting for busy signals? try isp.
aol kicked their busy signals, but it took them at least a year.
with internet knowledge growing, 'yeah my friend got cable and he helped me put my cable modem in' aol may not be able to fix this problem soon enough...
and as someone else said, banning *.aol.com from servers won't be as useful anymore.
Runnin' On Empty
With time, complaints about Mozilla not working will naturally decrease. Web developers are finally realizing that there are other browsers besides IE and Netscape 4. Some of them even realize there are standards they should be following.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
1045 hours is 43 and a half days. There are 1080 hours in 45 days. To use up your aol free trial you would have to use aol for over 23 hours a day! Most Dial up ISPs would kick you up the ass if you tried to use it for that long!
from the bailing-out-the-titanic-with-a-teaspon dept.
what the hell a teaspon is?
... will finally come to an end?
Say no to software patents.
(must be used within 30 days of signing up)
Tech savy people have hated AOL, well, since its inception. However, as some cheer on for the ship to sink, they might want to remember a few of the passengers that are on that ship, such as Netscape and ICQ. You might say, Screw Netscape, we've got Mozilla. However, the Web development community is not going to provide W3C compliant web sites until there is a viable business reason to do so. 35 million AOL users with Netscape browsers is a viable reason. AOL going kaput and MSN picking up all of those users means that the web will never be W3C compliant; it will be IE6 compliant. You can forget ever having a page render correctly in Mozilla. You can forget being able to take advantage of interactive pages. You can forget streaming media on anything but Windows Media Player. I just don't understand our community sometimes. We are incensed by Microsoft products, protocols, and business practices, but we rail against the only viable alternatives (read Netscape and Java). This is why I don't mess with a computer for stress relief anymore; I go fly fishing. ;-)
I moved my girlfriend's parents from AOL to cable internet from COX.
;-) ).
sheesh, wrong move?
I can't tell. On the one hand, that puke of an app AOL is gone from the system, and they have a snappy connection.
On the other hand, I have 2 people who call me when they click the wrong area, and the window goes behind Outlook Express, and they can't find it (yeah, I know, minimized, but they don't know that). Ruined my golf game on Sunday (miniture golf, that is
On AOL, they knew what they were doing. I thought I was saving headaches when they moved over. I don't know about them, but my headaches have increased.
AOL is still needed. Painful, but true. AOL is nice for users who still don't know what a power button is. I hope it survives as an 'entrance' to the net, and nothing more.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
AOL really does have a purpose. My parents refuse to learn anything about computers. They want to e-mail and browse the web but to quote my father: "I have no intention of typing anything."
For people like my parents, and countless others who have computer-phobia, AOL will be a nice solution for them. AOL is not a bad company (in fact they contribute quite a bit to open source) and there are people out there who don't care about connection speed or any of that stuff. They simply want to know as little as possible about computers.
I don't understand why the slashdot crowd has to assume that everybody wants to know what a URL is, or what a bookmark does or even how to use their computer.
I have seen countless members of my family struggle with the concept of a Window. The fact that AOL alone maximizes its self helps the non-technical in my family. Do you think that everybody who has Windows on a PC knows how to even move or resize a window? Not really.
AOL does serve a purpose for them and we shouldn't bash them just because they provide a service that seems useless to the technically saavy.
So unless AOL can find a way to distinguish itself from other ISPs, like it used to be, then I say let it sink. (Innovation -- what a concept!) Somewhat less spam, fewer annoying people online.
what about the sinking ship that is SLASHDOT???? when is there gonna be a story on how much slashdot has been sucking lately? any predictions as to how much longer it will survive?
The stock got upgraded. For all the people that are on the net, and those that are on the net now because of AOL in the beginning, there are still a LOT of people that aren't there.
It's really hard to kill a company that's not involved with massive fraud. Just look at SGI. It's been in the dumps for years, but continues on.
AOL will be around for a loooong time.
Chat rooms. Besides becoming a technical wizard (to an AOLer) and using IRC, where else can people chat with groups of other people online?
We are social creatures, after all.
Mozilla: AFAICT at least half of the development costs for Mozilla come from AOL still.
Winamp: They also own Nullsoft and allow them to put out a pretty good product ad-free for free.
It should also be noted that AOL uses OpenSSH internally and open sourced (a version of) their web server.
Sure, if they all had the rug pulled out from under them they'd probably limp along and find a new home, but that kind of disruption can't help rate of progress and all. And who likes "subscription models" that a lot of places seem to be resorting to?
Sure their marketing and their Windows IP stacks and their war against open Oscar and so on are pretty evil, but there's a lot of "good" in there, too.
(FWIW-I've never subscribed to AOL, but I've worked at companies contracted by AOL.)
More clueless users on my ISP (and yours)
Microsoft loses an "opponent" who has the backing to take them on when it comes to some issues
More clueless users on MSN
No matter what you say about AOLs clients, we have all know about "you've got mail", AIM, etc. Imagine if they go under and a large percentage of those customers go to MSN. While I don't particularly like AOL/Time Warner, they are almost a necessary evil to keep other evils in check.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I run about 1000 websites. Analyzing the logs for all sites combined over the past few years, the drop in AOL activity is pretty staggering. AOL alone used to account for 25% of all our traffic. As of today, it's down to about 8%.
Jan 1 2000: 24.97%
Jan 1 2001: 17.08%
Jan 2002: 12.32%
Feb 2002: 11.89%
Mar 2002: 11.41%
Apr 2002: 11.42%
May 2002: 11.26%
Jun 2002: 10.36%
Jul 2002: 8.22%
Aug 2002: 10.16%
Sep 2002: 9.97%
Oct 14 2002: 8.12%
AOL is still holding the #1 slot, but not by much. In January of this year, it had a 6% advantage over the #2 spot, now held by attbi.com. Now, that margin is down to about 2.5%.
AOL was my very first Internet provider. I outgrew them pretty quick and now I can't say I'm not a little happy that the outlook is poor for them. Since the Time Warner merger I've been more worried about that media conglomerate than Microsoft.
I suggest that a single corporation controlling what format your word-processing documents are in, or how you browse the files on your hard disk is at least marginally less dangerous than one which controls virtually every media entry point into your home! A huge number of American homes get almost every piece of information the average user knows how to retrieve via some channel touched by the AOL/Time Warner machine... scary...
I would be happy to such a consolidation of media power go away, if that actually happens.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
One thing I have noticed is that alot of people still equate AOL with the internet. I am constantly amazed by the number of "moms and pops" who think that AOL *IS* the internet.
Slowly that perception is changing, and with it AOLs brand recognition and value goes down the toilet.
the 'slide
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
Never get this marketing non-sence. If you are on the road you should simply use Internet and ssh into your UNIX server. Allways works for me and I go to alot of different countries. (Why lug a laptop for that matter.) People don't know the Internet and it may never happen.
Hotmail -- Way too slow.
AOL -- Finally to hell!
...that has a simple solution for Internet, email, instant messaging, some telephone support and, no not much more actually.
AOL provides these things but why is it so much bigger than the competition? Certainly the brand is important but what more is there to it? I am surprised that these bundles have not commodotized already.
Tor
I was wondering why I got Yet Another AOL Coaster in the mail last week for "AOL Titanium Improved Version 7.0" with three months free. My bank (RBC) sold them my address -- some of their advertising is inside.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
> version 8.0 of it's software
Slashdot, where illiteracy is valued above and beyond anything else.
that Salon sprang from the loins of M$, who might have the most to gain from this... Plus, that whole 'butterfly in the wind' thing is awfully evocative of M$'s crazy lil butterfly logo for MSN and all that crap...
Can somebody, please, /finally/ explain to me what AOL is, before it is gone? I've seen an enormous number of posts on this "AOL" thing over time on Slashdot, but I still have no clue as to what it is. Is it perhaps one of those America-only things? It is not only Americans whoe read and post on Slashdot, you know...
Give the newbies the pretty hand-held interface..
Give the rest of us a national inexpensive connection... Both analog modem and broadband..
Might keep them alive.. and flourishing even..
They have the resources to become a 'real' isp..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No? I didn't think so either.
AOLiens suck. There are a few people using AOL who are nice, but mostly they are people that drive the SUVs of the Internet. Over-hyped, wasting of resources, and likely to tip over if it is used for what it claims to do.
Jokeaday.com has been showing the true nature of the AOLien for many years now. I have encountered AOLiens both in person, and on the Interent, and I can tell you that what they seem to be in real life is in no way a reflection of the mosters they transform into on the "Internet".
If AOL dies a horrible corporate death, then I can only imagine what chaos it could cause. All the biggest freaks of the "Internet" will scatter, and we will not be able to discern an AOLien by a quick glance at email extensions, or the URL of a webpage. We must save AOL, even though we may be better off without it!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.
What do you mean " if "?
...What?
*Goes off and tries to use Internet in his neighborhood*
Amazingly, nobody has considered the one reasonably positive aspect of AOL... its MAIL.
"he's off 'is rocker" I can hear as you are now pressing the "reply button" ready to flame me for such treasonous talk. However, I would ask you this:
for $23.95 a month, does ANY other ISP offer you 500+ mails, each with a 16MB attachment?
"what do you need that malarkey for" you may ask. Among the obvious statement of "thats how Email service SHOULD BE", there is another reason.
I make freelance 3D Animations for clients. These files are often huge. Often the clients are computer-unsavvy. Setting up an FTP site is impossible for them - it's all I can do to get them to understand how to decompress a RAR/ACE file... or I will simply send them 16Mb edited versions of the videos I make.
I cannot afford some special business Email from AT&T or Verizon... especially when AOL's is $23.95 a month. Webbased harddrives are too slow, and depend on a broadband connection - many of my clients are still on 56K modems. But, they all have AOL.
There is a lot to hate about AOL, to be sure. But they STILL have some wonderful services for the money.... I can't understand why they don't play up their email service, though.
That'll work great, until newbies start replying to every piece of spam they get asking to be removed from the list. "Oh, look, it's my good friend at IGN again!"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
AOL... No other ISP has created such a community of people, though it is being emulated in variations with success. And thank God the user community are not all computer geeks (like me) but actually use it to talk to each other about just about anything. No need to be smart about computers. I've seen families use it to stay in touch across the country, friends having a good time in chat rooms. They use it for what it was built for. Face it...AOL isn't only about the corporation... it's about the people who use it. If people pay extra for it, it's because they like the ammenities, the familiarity, the ease of use, and the fact that they find people online that they can actually relate to. Maybe you're just making things easy on yourself by stereotyping thousands of people. If you'd like to see AOL go out of business, tell that to the people who keep it running, the techs who put in the man hours to keep the servers running, the tech support people on the phones everyday, the programmers, the administrators, and the marketing people. Would you like to smile in glee to their face when they discover they've lost their jobs? Would that really make you happy? Bottom line - AOL, Inc. is a business entity but the people who run it are real and want it to be successful based on good merit. And the people who use it could care less if you don't like it because they find in it what they like. If you don't like it, move on. If enough people feel the same way, AOL will get the message and adjust to get people back...by trying to make it better. And it will always be your choice to take it or leave it. Criticism is good if you're trying to build something better. But if all you're trying to do is tear it down, I'd call that envy.
gtar "When you know, wait awhile. It will pass."
My toddler has gotten so used to an endless supply of "AOL Frisbees" that I am afraid he will start to think that all CD's are for air-based recreation.
"You've got frisbee"
The most annoying part is that they don't even fly that well. They need curved edges, which take too long to shape right on a hot dashboard. I am experimenting with magnifying glass-based heat-shaping. But, the fumes are noxious. Plus, I can only try it when the kids are asleep.
Table-ized A.I.
What happens to AIM if/when AOL dies?
MSN service seems too flaky, it always seems to go be going down for "5 minutes" or "maintanance"... I've been signed on to AIM for weeks at a time without dropping.
MSN will fill the void when AOL goes.
And we all WANT that to happen..
Don't forget, a lot of AOL users (and dialup users in general) have a second phone line already just for internet access. Dropping the second phone line in favor of getting cable would on average decrease their phone bill by $15-20 per month. For most folks , this actually pushes the cost of AOL just a tiny bit above cable.
--- What
since they are going to use mozilla? fuck you hippies.
That is basically why I signed onto AOL in '92. I was doing BBS stuff for music discussions and playing games like Trade Wars (Shameless plug for a Trade-Wars-Like game). I had the internet through the university. (Getting PPP to work with windows 3.1 was interesting)
Anyway, AOL, for me, was a BIGGER BBS. I could communicate with the whole country, not just my local community. The internet was something different. The internet was using Gopher to find info from another university for a paper I was writing.
After I got my first 200$ AOL bill for playing Neverwinter nights non-stop, (No, I didn't die.) I then discovered KALI, and I could play over the internet.
Now, it seems, (I haven't had AOL since 93-so I could be wrong.) AOL is just an over-glorigfied BBS that also has (ping-poor) internet access also.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
oh lord, what a horrible way to go....... my thoughts and prayers are w/ the family
From the article:
"I get this question a lot," Kimball, the marketing vice president, says of the theory that people can become too sophisticated for AOL. "This is how I respond: I start off with my daughter who is 7. Will she come to me when she's 12 and say, 'I've grown up steeped in technology, so what I really need you to do is go build me a way to read my mail that is really complicated'? We think that simplicity or ease of use doesn't map to experience."
Wow, talk about missing the point.
There are other ways to get mail that are uncomplicated -- basically under the sole assumption that you have a working net connection and a web browser. Frankly, I don't see AOL winning the battle of "Easy to use E-mail for the masses" against companies like Yahoo!. AOL has gotten where it is by making the phone wires work; they have no analogous raison d'etre in a broad band world. They had parleyed their modem pools into the "killer app" of the early internet... a big active commons. They have let the commons slip away.
Time-Warner is dead (been consumed by AOL),
long live Time-Warner.
Did anyone else notice that the swirl in AOL's logo looks like water circling a drain? An appropriate symbol for a company that is circling the drain!
How ya like dat?
One of the big reasons why their interface sucks is that marketing got their claws in it and tore it up badly. Plus marketing screwed up so frelling badly when they made that big ad campaign back in the mid-90s without consulting R&D to see if they would have any problems with a large influx of subscriptions.
This is some of the reasons why I dislike marketing so much is they think they run the business.. Nope they dont.. They bring in the customers, BUT they need a working product or system first..
DONT oversell, or try to sell something that aint tangable or is not working, dammot! THIS is what pisses customers off so much and makes them cynical toward businesses like AOHell.
Plus dont piss off your most vital asset, volunteers. They were the heart of AOHell back in the early days of the operation. I guess the suits looked at the papers and reports instead of actually going into the chat rooms and seeing for themselves (which would not surprise me).
Plus their employeee relations with their customer support team. ( www.observers.net enuf said) There are horror stories rolling out of that department that SICKEN me for gods sake! I've made it a policy to ask employees of a company if they like working for that company in general before I purchase anything from that business to see if I want to sink my money into a business that takes pride in its people, or takes pride in "revolving doors" and high turnovers due to poor morale or other issues.
You take care of your people, keep marketing on a short leash, and make dammed sure that your customers are happy, no matter what it takes, you'll do fine.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Yes, I just posted my FTP password.
/. comment, I deleted the account. I also changed my /. password, which was the same.
:)
Since I couldn't delete the
Right now, I'm kinda feeling giddy for having avoided massive problems. (You know, that feeling after a close brush with death..
What's this Submit thingy do?
... the Mom and Pop ISP user ducks under it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
AOL was ment to get get non-tech savvy people on the internet. It was very successful in doing that, good or bad it gave people that barely knew how to double click a chance to get on the Internet. Kudos to AOL for giving the Internet an easier to use interface. But now that people are getting more and more tech savvy AOL is moving into antiquity. I personally do not like AOL but AOL gave the 60 year old grandparent the ability to send email and 'surf' the web by providing a single starting point. AOL was a big help in fueling the internet and should be recognized for its pros. It's kind of like when people die, dead and dying people always seem to be recognized a little bit more positivly then they were in life. The jerk that owed you $30 in life becomes, magically, an OK guy at the funeral. Go fig. My $21.54 cents.
Doh! Flashbacks to my BBS days where we had DOORS to the internet. Ack! Lynx go away! Lynx go away! Ahhh I have to flush my eyes!!!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Is she the one who returned her DVD player because she "didn't like those black bars at the top and bottom of the screen?"
Time Warner could save AOL in a heartbeat if they started really thinking about the products they could bring together.
The merger was touted as the beginning of that great "convergence" thing VC's were all abuzz about in the mid 90's
You want convergence? Offer AOL broadband subscribers the ability to stream Sopranos episodes on demand. Sex and the City episodes. Mind of the Married Man.
think about it, they own the client and the transmission technology... it'd be (almost) hack-proof digital distribution.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not if they like the idea of meeting teenagers online for sex. If that's their game, then AOL is the place to be.
My other first post is car post.
And to add to the failing frenzy, AOL has two failing stars to host the AOL 8.0 Release Party:
"...AOL 8.0's launch -- it will be unveiled at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, at a "star-studded" bash hosted by Dana Carvey and featuring Alanis Morissette..."
Maybe they could use Glitter as the official movie of AOL 8.0.
> I thought AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS that people could use, in the days of Prodigy and Compuserve,
> well before the Internet was remotely available to Joe 486.
AOL has been many things thru its existence. At one point, it was a Commodore 64 network, & for many years had the largest collection of software for that platform. Until one day (IIRC, in 1995) the PHB decided to remove this resource. And without any warning, it gone in the time it took to reformat a hard drive. Now about the only trace it has of its history with the Commodore is the name of a few forums -- IF the ``Quantum" discussion areas are still in existence.
In my experience, this is typically how AOL has functioned: management would make all kinds of promises to its customers, then without warning renege on these promises -- obviously because of the extra money breaking these promises would make. Steve Case swore again & again in 1993-6 that AOL would never have advertisements, that he prised the community feeling of AOL; sometime after I finally cancelled my AOL account in 1997, AOL started shoving ads onto its customers.
Internet connectivity for AOL at the beginning was an afterthought, an add-on that allowed new customers to keep relationships created on other online services (the Internet in 1992 wasn't even a buzz-word); now it's AOL's chief selling point. AOL once boasted about its member community; now it's the equivalent of a combined strip amll & red light district. In 1992, AOL had a network-based GUI that was truly better than anything short of a high-end workstation running X -- yet ran quite nicely on a 2400 baud connection; from what I hear, it's old, marred by uncontrollable commercial pop-ups & bogged down even on 56K dial-up connections.
And until recently, AOL has shown an uncanny ability at killing every technology it acquired: Navistar (a company that wrote its own competitor to Mosaic) & GNN (O'Reilly's own attempt to create a commercial web site) both were bought, operated fitfully for a year or two, then quietly euthenised, & now are barely a footnote in computer history. AOL has teated Mozilla, winamp, the AOL web server (used as part of OpenACS) far better.
It's possible that AOL could be saved, & be made a company that delivered true value to its obviously non-technical customer base; but I doubt its current management has a clue of how to accomplish this.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
AOL is sinking because it's focus is still getting "technophobe grandma" online. That's messed up. (Hell I'm sure it's still the leader there, but grandma is either online or doesn't care at this point).
AOL should focus on providing all the services WE AS GEEKS take for ganted.
AOL will work it's ass off to be a broadband provider, but that isn't it's true strength anyway. (It makes things easier for AOL though). AOL is about "value added" and it has to add value for me to pay the "bring your own service" plan.
That's the only way it will survive.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
cause once it's loose, it
will get itself into trouble.
are you new to the english language?
Yeah, I see the stock price, and I'm glad that I'm not an owner. If I had owned some Time/Warner I would be irate. I'm not an AOL customer either.
But they added another MILLION subscribers in the last 9 months. And they project $850 MILLION dollars in positive cash flow in 2003. They have a broadband problem, and it will probably cut into their margins. But they can solve that problem and may retain and continue to add to their customer base. That is a long ways from "You've got bankruptcy!"
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
My supervisor got a call from the QA team asking if that was supposed to be a joke or not, if you can believe it.
Well, the part that probably confused them is that it's not funny or even clever.
And that all might be a moot point soon anyway thanks to WorldCom after all AOL really doesnt have dialup numbers. UUNet owns those numbers, as well as MSN, WebTV, UUNet and a few dozen no-name Internet companies use those numbers and resell access to the Internet through UUNet.
Thus this may be the biggest problem with WorldCom going under - they may take the supposedly largest chunk of the Internet population with them when those people lose access...
MSN, WebTV, AOL... many smaller ISPs... supposedly accounting for 60%+
Looks like the Internet collaspe has begun with a boom that'll be far larger than it's dotcom boom!
- Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
I haven't finished tiling my office with AOL CDs.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I remember the days when AOL distributed their software on one (1) 3.5-inch floppy diskette. Now that was convenience if you wanted to put the diskette in your shirt pocket on the way out the door.
I'd like to chat with some lemurs.
Whatever else one may think of AOL (don't get me started...), it's one of the great business stories of our time...
More or less at the peak of the bubble, the folks at AOL managed to merge a company of highly dubious quality into a media empire that was chock full of real assets. They took a mountain of funny money and converted it into a somewhat smaller but still substantial pile of real green.
On the other hand, TW spent billions for a giant pile of crap--the shareholders of the old TimeWarner should band togethor to hunt down and publicly humiliate the TW execs that allowed this to happen....
Given a world of pagers, wireless phones, internet access at public libraries, etc., I think that relatively few people have the need (or even desire) for a second phone line for internet connectivity.
Or for something else. There are a lot of subscription services on the Internet for various things. Various premimum and subscription-only services.
Something that AOL could do would be to cut deals with a lot of these providers, to get a discounted rate with these providers. And yes, a lot of these premium services would be very likely to be willing to give a discount in return for the number of potential subscribers AOL could toss in their direction.
From the customer end, AOL gives discounted rates for various premimum services or even effectively free under the base rate. And they give centralized billing as well for all these subscription services. Just go to a single area and checkmark off what you want and don't want.
AOL could even offer caching for these services as well, which also benefits both from the provider and and from the customer end. That's probably how they could negotiate a reduced rate "Give us the content at a lower fee and we'll be eating the bandwidth costs on our end". And the AOL customers are pulling this stuff off of AOL servers then.
Yes, the Internet is all about eliminating the middlemen, but the fact is that middlemen have their uses. Of course I doubt that AOL is going to see this until its too late.
Honestly, this sounds strange, but AOL needs to simplify things. They are known as "The ISP for your grandmother" but I even get confused by their bastard interface.
And why exactly do they need two instant message protocals? Let one go (ICQ!!) to the OSS community.
And it would be REALLY nice if they had a "thin client" (might actually exist and I'm not aware) that allows customers to use their pipe without installing all their bloated software. I mean, they are the broadest reaching ISP on the planet.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Here's a little interesting (and off-topic) tidbit -- and one that reflects people's insistence on using products from companies like AOL/Microsoft/whatever that aren't necessarily the best, but are perceived as the "safest":
I lived on Southport avenue in Chicago for a while, and every morning went to a small bagel shop for breakfast. It wasn't a brand-name shop, but it was inexpensive, clean, and the food was really good. It didn't do super business, but got by just fine for years.
As the neighborhood gentrified, a corporate-chain bagel shop leased a space 1/2 block over and announced their imminent opening. The small bagel shop began preparations to close, assuming they wouldn't be able to do business against the chain. Right up until the day the corporate shop opened, I thought they were being pessimistic.
Well, the morning that the corporate shop opened, they had a line outside the store full of people who had picked up a "buy one bagel get one free" grand opening coupon.
Just down the block, the small shop had set up a table with bags of bagels and a sign: "take one bagel for free, get two more for free" -- offering passers-by three free bagels with no line.
I sat on my front steps, and watched people WALK BY the free bagel table to go stand in line at the corporate shop...then, after waiting in line and using their coupon, WALK BY the free bagel table AGAIN to get onto the train.
Eventually, I went over and got three free bagels. Nobody had taken the bagels since I had started watching, and the girl next to the table said nobody had taken them since they'd opened. After hearing this, I paid for all three bagels, and admitted to myself that I had been wrong about their pessimism -- they were right all along.
They closed for the last time that afternoon, and the corporate bagel shop was soon joined by a corporate coffee shop. Of course, there was already a corporate coffee shop nearby, but that's OK -- both are thriving.
Oh, and once I bought a sandwich at the corporate bagel shop. It (honestly) wasn't very good, and I never went back.
Here in Brazil we have a stupid regulamentation that rules that the medium provider cannot provide internet access.
In other words, if your phone company offers you ADSL service for, suppose, $30 they can connect you to the net, but cannot give yoy access to the net. You MUST contract an ISP (and pay mor $30 for the internet access).
This stupid law doubles the price of large bandwidth (64kbps, 128kbps). Just due to a stupid lobby that keeps this regulamentation (note, it's not a law).
My opinion about this? The largest ISP in Brazil (UOL) is losing market share because the second largest (Terra) is owned by one of the largest telephone company in Brazil (Telefonica). Of course that Terra subscribers have discounts in dial-up connections and on ADSL contracts.
What might happen. When Terra becomes large enough the lobby will fall, and the largest ISP will smash his face on the floor.
I can't believe they aren't taking no providences about this...
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Is because I write "Return to Sender" on every CD they send to my house.
For all of you AOLusers out there - version 8.0 will be pop-up free [News.com].
-- jimmycarter
I've been a heavy duty internet user since 1991 when my employer first got a connection to the NSF's "NREN" network. I've *never* used AOL. Not even once. Never even visited AOL's website either.
If I follow this quote from the article correctly,
"I'm not sending you a file that you listen to later," Kimball says, describing the service. "I'm getting you right now, while we talk. I know you like the Stones, and you're in my life, and as we listen to the song I say, 'Remember the time we went to the concert three years ago?'"
Is this not a violation of copyright law? Even if the sender own a *legit* copy of the CD and ripped the Stones song, isn't sharing it in digital form illegal since the listener could also save the song?
Or does this come under the realm of illegal broadcasting? Does the sender need to pay CARP fees? Is this addressed in the article on Webcasting from earlier today?
OK, so who wants to bring AOL up on charges...
THIS SPACE FOR RENT Call 1-800-555-CARL
I used to work for CompuServe and many of us began asking years ago, "what is the value of CompuServe in light of the Internet? Frankly, if virtually the same content is available via the web/ftp/usenet/gopher who's going to use CompuServe?"
CompuServe (and AOL) both had an opportunity to become a major web presence as data catalogers and frontends. The problem with the net today is the same problem it has always had, the complete anarchy of resources. Had either CompuServe or AOL dedicated themselves to becoming the collective front-end for web access (offering web-based services like the Executive News Service, etc.) I think their long-term outlook would be much better than it is.
Unfortunately, both desparately wanted to preserve their dial traffic revenue to the exclusion of all else.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Is this crapware a gig yet? It's starting to compete with the OS size-wise. Jeez
"While we all hate AOL they still do offer the most access numbers out of any other ISP if you do a lot of traveling."
I do not hate AOL. I think they made some bone-headed moves, but all in all a good way for users to get all their information. You know the washington post (which is part of the microsoft network news channel) and salon has been out to get AOL.
They look for things like adverstizing, instead of subscriptership. They do not see the bottom line, only exploit stories that were incorrect.
In today's mad driven world we look for anything like how many times did martha stewart have conversations with imclone president, and blow it out of propotion, rather than relie on the truth.
Besides do we want microsoft 's msn to be the top contender if AOL fails?
"If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.'"
AOL doesn't really seem to be having this problem, given that their user base is up to nearly 40 million people and growing every day. As for broadband competition, most AOL users who go broadband just switch to the "roll-your-own" service that only costs $9.95 a month, and has way less overhead for AOL.
AOL's real problem at the moment is the loss of advertising dollars that came after the dot-com busts, when companies realized that consumers tend to ignore online advertising, which doesn't really matter in the long run, because all the TW money will offest things in the long run.
Give AOL a few years for AOL to be absorbed into TW, and for all the idiots who bought AOL at stupid prices to get over their losses, and the company will look just as good as it always did.
AOL
ITS is the possessive form of "IT"
If I was a Professional Editor for a major website, I'd get it right.
Where are these cheaper ISPs?
Where is this broadband that's cheaper than AOL?
I'd like to switch, but I haven't found a cheaper solution. Switching off AOL would be inconvenient because I'd have a new email address, so I would like to be able to save money. I don't want to pay more just to get off AOL on some principle. (Or to stop Slashdotter's making fun of me).
The local ISPs in New York cost as much as or more than AOL for dialup.
The local geek-friendly ISP, Panix, costs a good bit more.
Earthlink is basically the same price last I checked.
Broadband is another $10 more per month.
Cheaper? Where? Am I seeing high prices just because I'm in NYC? Is the cheap local ISP a SLashdot myth?
Don't AOL market themselves a lot using the term online service rather than internet service. As I'm sure most slashdotters know - internet - interconnection between networks. The standard AOL client cannot be easily used to interconnect two networks. Try setting up internet connection sharing. I have heard there is a hack (pppshare?) that will do it but haven't seen it working. Also I believe there is a client available in the US that does allow connection a LAN to the rest of the internet. This hasn't been localised to the UK.
More and more people have more than one computer at home. I should be surprised AOL hasn't addressed this yet, but then I know that the moment you say "network" or "routing" to anyone in power in AOL it will initiate a cogitation about golf or the wine they had at lunch.
My folks were paying for two isps (one of them AOL) and I just networked up their house (now I can plug in too!) and scrapped AOL. Yeah. It felt so good.
A good friend of mine works at AOL and I know that their company is mostly an arse kicking exercise.
(I knew that would get your attention.) Actually. For the father, grandmother, kid in high school or someone without a technically-savy background, AOL is just what it is...a good start for people to learn online skills. I have tried AOL, its very basic and I have to say without broadband its terrible. I would think the child controls help someone with kids in the household rather than unleashing the whole internet on them. Chatting (some rooms bad), IMs (from strangers not good), and Im sure theres a lot of other bad things on AOL for the younger crowd.
The main reason they're still in business is that there still is a high percentage of people with computers which wouldnt know how to go about getting out onto the internet and finding things without AOL offering them in menu format. (well, gui menu format). Not saying it sucks, since for that crowd its great, but as the world's population becomes more PC and tech literate, AOL membership will be slowly creeping downward. It serves its purpose for those who need it. Yes, they do have the largest dialup list, possibly bigger than AT&T worldnet/prodigy/etc.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
Yes AOL was my first PC connection on the P1 shortly before the millenium. I asked then if I could use a linux OS. Well now we've moved on to cable and I suppose that the (unsupported) AOL software is being tried by the Lindows OS. But still no overt move away from windows possibly for business reasons. Have you noticed by the way that Warren Buffet has been buying up fiber optics at a discount? Could Aol be next? Have you seen the Walmart dialup software, identical to Compuserve?
mem in MMII
I use Earthlink and this borders on slander.
Frankly very few of the people at Earthlink have any connection with Scientology. That is like saying 10% of earning go to the Catholic Church because a certain number of executive give money to the church.
I don't like Scientology but, you strike me as someone who is spreading FUD.
Maybe AOL should pick him up...
"Dude, you're getting AOL..."
What a winning combination.
AOL's been rumored to be dying since around '95 if I remember correctly. AOLWatch used to post new links about AOL-related issues on a daily basis - it seems like it has been on autopilot for the last couple of years replaying the same pages over and over again. I guess David Cassel abandoned it for fear of the Ur-Quan returning and took off for Pluto.
Everyone said AOL was going to die years ago... Then they went flat rate and got new member singing up in droves. I'm sure AOL has another ace up their sleeve and will be able to cheat the reaper yet again.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
If a company offered original and unique content of interest to me, if a company offered forums with intelligent, non-spammed dialogue, and if a company avoided locking users into a glitzy proprietary interface, I'd sign up. I might even be willing to pay a premium price.
Before the web happened, and before Usenet turned into a nest of raving loons, Compuserve approached this model. Maybe AOL, which bought Compuserve and promptly repackaged it as an AOL clone, ought to ponder what made online services work back in the stone age before Mosaic.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Rights and privacy? Jesus. We're talking about the web here.
Are you saying that you don't mind unknown 3rd parties having, essensialy root access to your machine? Well, that's what they'll have if you can install spyware or whatever.
Belive it or not, I actualy do have more personal information then what websites I visit on my desktop and laptop machines, such as AIM chat logs, etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ease of use? No. AOL's interface gets credit for being newby-friendly, but it's not because the software's easy to use, it's because it's incredibly restrictive. Everything's hardwired into the thick (bloated, rigid) client; it's impossible to change anything much. AOL is for people who like it when there's only one way to do anything. The elderly, for one group, can handle that. They find it comforting.
The contrast with something like the iApps that come with OS X couldn't be more dramatic. AOL's cluttered but gives you no options; iTunes looks simple but is robust and gives you many ways to accomplish what you want, depending on your working style. No comparison.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Irony is when the expressed meaning bears a certain relationship to the opposite meaning or a different meaning altogether. What we have here is a funny, incongruous coincidence. Contrary to popular belief, Alanis Morisette did not get her language usage straight and it seems to have bastardized the word "irony".
Yes, the founder of earthlink, Sky Dayton, is a scientologist, and there are lots of nutjob websites that make lots of unsupported claims, but no evidence that 10% of gross revenue goes to the CoS. In Q2 2002 Earthlink had gross revenues of $335m. Please show me who in the Earthlink management team received $33m, and then gave it to the CoS.
But it really didn't recover since John broke up with Brian:i d=02/05/ 14/0138249&mode=thread&tid=95
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?s
AOL is consistantly the worst rated ISP in existence. The only reason people continue to use it is because they don't want to go through the trouble of changing screen names. Also, people who get a new computer see that shining AOL icon on the desktop and don't really know that they have more options to getting online.
SIGFAULT
You've brought up another question. Sure, every one refers to them as coasters - but really who actually uses them to sit drinks on? For me, AOL CD's go from my mailbox to my hand and then directly into the trash. I don't even use failed CDR's for putting drinks on. Who does this? Are there really people in the world that are either 1) too cheap to buy real coasters, 2) have no shame at all and prefer to use CD's than no coasters at all? I'd really like to know.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: AOL is dying
Another more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered AOL community when IDC confirmed that AOL market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that AOL has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. AOL is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict AOL's future. The hand writing is on the wall: AOL faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for AOL because AOL is dying. Things are looking very bad for AOL. As many of us are already aware, AOL continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AOL 8.0 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AOL 8.0 developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AOL 8.0 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
AOL 7.0 leader Theo states that there are 7,000,000 users of AOL 7.0. How many users of AOL 7.0 are there? Let's see. The number of AOL 8.0 versus AOL 7.0 posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7,000,000/5 = 1,400,000 AOL 7.0 users. AOL 6.0 posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of AOL 7.0 posts. Therefore there are about 700,000 users of AOL 6.0. A recent article put AOL 8.0 at about 80 percent of the AOL market. Therefore there are (7,000,000+1,400,000+700,000)*4 = 36,400,000 AOL 8.0 users. This is consistent with the number of AOL 8.0 Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Times Warner, abysmal sales and so on, AOL 8.0 went out of business and was taken over by AOL 5.0 who sell another troubled OS. Now AOL 5.0 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that AOL has steadily declined in market share. AOL is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If AOL is to survive at all it will be among dilettante dabblers. AOL continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, AOL is dead.
Fact: AOL is dying
Take it in the spirit in which it's given. The story is a troll... so it deserves this.
Why bother.
Most people are bored stiff by the technology that makes the Internet work. It's not that they're "stupid", it's just that they find all this geeky stuff about as interesting as dental science.
I've put AOL on laptops for traveling bosses for the same reason. Even set up the phone numbers for their destination so they'd only need to click on the AOL icon. They don't have/want/need a clue about Unix, don't have a Unix server to SSH into, and weren't going places where they'd have access to a PC anyway.
The mainstream public will never have a reason to stop pointing and clicking and get into the "innards" of Unix and the Internet. They'll use whatever capabilities someone (re-)packages in a nice, easy to use product, and that's just fine.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Hello? Eudora, KMail, Silpheed, even Lookout Excess and Outhouse do multiple identities in email! You can set up multiple email accounts in these clients to allow multiple users to use email. In other categories of Internet software, the "multiple personalities" trick is even simpler. This is no longer a problem. Most ISPs give multiple emails with accounts as a matter of course.
The "no multiple screen-names" argument is no longer valid.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
>> ...t's the only way they're going to get support for answering stupid questions...
Not to be surly, but since when is something like "How do I send a picture through e-mail" a stupid question? If "small businesses" don't want to answer their customers' questions, odds are they'll remain small.
Bashing AOL and AOL users is just tech snobbery, pure and simple.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Someone could really make a movie out of that...
maybe with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks...
Maybe they could have AOL throw some money at it too... call it something catchy like... You've got mail
nah, it would never work.
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
I installed 7 a few weeks ago (my ADSL provider switched my lines to my new provider, who then informed me that they would mail my modem in a couple days, leaving me without access for a week), it asked if I wanted it to take over my network connections, I said yes, it did, very painless, actually. didn't even mess up my ICS (internet connection sharing).
When I got my DSL modem, I set it up and it became my default connection. AOL recognized it and allowed me to use that connection as my default for AOL as well as for everything else. No problems.
When I installed AOL 8 last week, the only strange thing it wanted to do was become my default CD player.
I don't like the MDI interface at all, or the way it steals focus at bad times, or the dumbed down version of AIM that comes with it, but it's nowhere near as bad as I remember it being (from 99).
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Prepaid services (such as MaGlobe) typically have access numbers all over the place. They're not as cheap ($15 for 16 hours) as flat-rate dial-up ISPs, but since my primary Internet access is via cable modem, I only need dial-up when I'm out of town. Before going someplace, I'll see what phone numbers I need to use at the destination and plug those into the dial-up networking settings. (I still need to get Squid set up on my notebook so it'll filter ads...)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
10-20 cent per slice of cheese, I can't imagine them paying more than a penny per slice.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
From the article:
It was never really an Internet company. AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.
There is no doubt that this is what aol has become but you are incorrect in how it came about. AOL truly never was an Internet company as you say... but neither was it based on your halfway house idea. This is bullocks.
It was not started as a buffer for the internet.. it as started without the internet... a subscription bbs. These things really did exist.... The internet killed the BBS.. aol is just hanging on longer then most.
'..that kernel panicked like a nun in a crack house!'
Save untold millions by stopping the flood of aol cdroms, and then lower prices to $15 a month?
The dial-up ISP I used, access4less.net, only charged $6 a month. Juno charges $10. I think AT&T charges about $14.
MSN charges $23, but they only get away with that by giving away $400 off the price of new computer.
So maybe AOL isn't price competitive anymore?
AOL has always marketed itself by encouraging the idea that the internet is a big bad scary place that is full of potential harm and is difficult to navigate. The term "half-way house" used in the post is right on.
They have been very successful in particular with older, non-technical folks. For example, both my parents and in-laws use AOL and every time I suggest that they could get everything they need on the internet for less money and less hassle by dumping AOL, they look at me like I'm insane.
What bugs me the most about AOL is that they disguise who their true customers are. They want people to believe that when they sign up for an account, they are the customer. In fact, those poor schmucks are simply fodder for the legions of advertisers and commercial interests that are AOL's true customers.
The stinking crap that is AOL.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unfortunately, if AOL goes down, MSN steps in. MSN is now the nation's second most-widely-used ISP. Although a distant second, MSN is still a significant competitor./ msn.ao l.ap/index.html
Here's a CNN article on the release of both aol 8.0 and msn 8.0:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/10/14
Can't live with them, can't kill 'em.
"Faggot" is a troll. If you couldn't tell by his username and website, look at his old postings. You've been had.
'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.' Delete online and substitute Windows for AOL and you'll get a better idea on why that ain't true.
No, I'm not.
Karma: Undead.
What will middle america do now to access wal mart.com?
The biggest roadblock in the way of ditching AOL? Usually, the kids/family. The employee wanting to switch wasn't willing to make his kids and/or wife suffer through getting a brand new email address, learning everything all over again, etc.
I was just talking to my office mate about the evils of AOL and the how horrible their external gateways are and his response is His kids and wife know this, they like this, they can't suffer the 2 days down time, and he'll get no pat on the back once its all fixed.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
After stuggling with AOL for a few years (slow connections, poor page rendering, incompatibility w/ linux, etc) I switched to DSL, and I would think that DSL is much easier. You call up ATT or Ameritech or whoever, and they come and set you up. Then, you double-click on the big blue E picture and your online, 10+ times faster than with AOL dialup. Tech support isn't that bad, and plus theres less software that can break.
Anyone ever seen aol X.[anything other than 0]? Apparently they think that changing the way their navigation buttons look constitutes a new version.
Will September finally end?
Why'd I leave AOL? Not the customer service - the software. AOL's software, at least at the time I had it, was horrendous. It crashed every 15 minutes and cut you off the Net every 20. Just awful. It wasn't the access number or anything either - it was just screwed up. Plus, the endless ads, on the service which was being payed for, were evil.
So I got Earthlink, and love it.
By the way, my grandfather (who is in his mid 70's) still uses AOL. He complains of the same problems, even though he has a PC and I a Mac. He wants to switch, but too many people know his email address and he doesn't want the hassle.
This is hardly surprising, given the resources they waste sending out tins to people who don't want them. I already have DSL, and I received three of the tins today, all to the same address.
I've lost my AOL disk - does anyone know where I can get a replacement? I may be in big trouble - it had the internet on it, too.
All things in moderation; including moderation
Those only work on windows, so what have you really lost?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's funny someone at Time should feel that way. Time sent me a free copy of their magazine this month. It contained several adverts for tobaco companies, dated news and lame opinion on why we should blow up Iraq. It one found itself in the trash quickly and I felt sorry for the scrub trees that gave their all to make it happen. The Wall Street Journal, a daily publication, barely manages to stay relavent. Time and other monthly publications do not. Oh wait, it's an art critic! He must have been a mac person. Bob, you flamer, I'd say it was time for you to find another job. The era of monthly news magazines is far longer gone than that of dial up ISPs.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From the linked page:
Price: $2345.50
Order your Canopy Demo Kit (Part # RLN5460A) by calling (800) 422- 4210. When prompted: press 8, then ext. 6883. Please have your credit card information ready when placing your order. No previous account required.
Whoa! That's going to be a tough sell to the AOL crowd. It's ~100 times the price of a month of AOL service. While I'm glad you were able to find a good alternative to AOL, that's really an unreasonable choice for most people.
rooooar
For Microsoft, it's not necessarily about making money -- at least not yet. The company's seven-year old service has yet to make a profit, and the Redmond software giant clearly is not shy about spending money -- it spent $500 million on developing the new version and plans to spend $300 million in a massive advertising campaign, including everything from TV ads to a launch party in New York featuring singer Lenny Kravitz, said Bob Visse, MSN marketing director.
Rather, Microsoft sees a future for MSN that will someday justify the billions of dollars in development and marketing spent on the service over the years.
"We believe that this is going to be a very very big business, a business the size of Windows or the size of Office in the future," he added, referring to Microsoft's two largest revenue-earning products, the Windows operating system and Office suite of business software. "It's something that consumers will come to rely on in their everyday lifestyle."
</snip>
From: http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20021013/busi ness/19285.shtml
AOL infringes on my privacy by selling my information to 3rd parties. Same with Yahoo!. Earthlink doesn't. Nuff said.
Uhm, this is a joke. It is not really a troll, but it is CERTAINLY not informative. Try reading and finding the humor in it. Jesus Christ, you people are fucking retarded.
...the best ISP, or better put, network provider has to be Equant/Sita for access anywhere in the world. If you can get the access numbers or belong to a company that does....
do you want unrestricted access out of China, Iran, Myamar?...North Korea....Sita's network has it....
and access points in every country in the world that has an International airport....
Friend of mine is a longtime ELN employee, and when queried about the Co$ and ELN, informs folk that there was a decision way back when to keep the two entirely separate, and so it remains.
And frankly, if Sky wants to tithe to the Co$, that's his business, so long as it doesn't impact ELN or its customers. I'm sure plenty of folk here on slashdot contribute to causes that others of us would be appalled by!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
unlike anywhere else on the internet, AOL is the one place where you can look up almost any topic, or any hobby, and within one or two mouse clicks, find THOUSANDS of people engaged in chat regarding that subject.
/-r4d 31337 snobbies would surely consider "lamers"), pedophiles and spammers galore - but there are also a ton of people worth meeting on there.
No 404 page not found. No inconsistent web page interfaces. No connect timeouts (as long as you can get into AOL, you're a-ok from there).
Two or so mouse clicks and you have found a thriving community of hundreds of thousands of people who are talking about what you want to talk about. You can talk with fellow cancer survivors, or fellow skydivers, and from what I understand, they now even have multimedia (mp3) resources. You can go and engage in mutual admiration of older women, or read the latest gossip on some supermodel, or try your luck at their built in matchmaking service. All at once. All within just a few mouse clicks.
It's like shopping at Minnesota's Mall of America - it's all right there in one place. AOL is also without a doubt one of the most hopping'est hookup spots on the net, bar fraggin' none.
Yes, there are tons of lamers on AOL - hackers, trolls, newbies (whom the
The benefit of a closed community the size of AOL is, it is like a small nation in and of itself, complete with the most diverse population of any single spot on the internet. It is the first, most alive, and most happening portal on the net, bar none.
If AOL goes away, that will be the end of the most vibrant and easily accessible community on the net.
Imagine all those people forced to go out and be among us ultra rad 31337 slashdotting rocket scientist h4x0rs. Oh, the annoyance. If you value your holy and most high Internet experience, I suggest we all pray for the good health of AOL as a giant, vibrant, well populated, even closed community.
BTW, this ain't a troll. I say all this as a well versed internet savvy Slackware/RedHat/Debian user who started way back in the CLI days when ya had to download floppy disks to install Linux.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Being someone who uses Linux as his primary os, you may wonder what on earth I'm doing with an AOL account. Well the reason is simple, portability. I run about 40 or so linux boxes in various places, I'm basicly on call 24 hours a day to support these for my customers. This means that if I travel about I can jack into any phone line and not worry about isp call charges. AOL is the only ISP in the UK to offer toll free internet access across all the UK telcos. There are a few others who will offer toll free from BT lines only and at twice the cost of AOL too! I value the service AOL provides so much that I went out a purchased a vmware licence so I can connect to AOL and still run linux underneath. Now if only there were some way to connect to AOL using linux that works in the uk I could be rid of vmware and its M$ os
Since they give the power to AOL, which is one of the biggest foes of Evil Microsoft.
I want tender love now!
Elkobim
Damn, that's scary. Truth is stranger than fiction, or something.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
you've been a customer for years haven't you?
Everyone who depends on someone else for a product or service is a customer.
I've worked as resident geek, in management, and in staff positions, all in an IT environment. In my experience, many techies relish the isolation from other people that their jobs provide. They are not comfortable associating with people whose decisions often boil down to "I like it that way". In other words, they expect human behavior to be as logical as the code they write. It isn't, of course, and we often see that fact reflected in the bitterness and impatience of many techies who treat their fellows as "dumb" because they don't understand the difference between, say, a dangling pointer and a regular expression.
They can get away with that if they're locked up in a cubicle someplace, but that attitude will kill any business that depends on customer loyalty and return business.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
One fine day, the bus driver went to the bus garage, started his bus,
and drove off along the route. No problems for the first few stops -- a few
people got on, a few got off, and things went generally well. At the next
stop, however, a big hulk of a guy got on. Six feet eight, built like a
wrestler, arms hanging down to the ground. He glared at the driver and said,
"Big John doesn't pay!" and sat down at the back.
Did I mention that the driver was five feet three, thin, and basically
meek? Well, he was. Naturally, he didn't argue with Big John, but he wasn't
happy about it. Well, the next day the same thing happened -- Big John got on
again, made a show of refusing to pay, and sat down. And the next day, and the
one after that, and so forth. This grated on the bus driver, who started
losing sleep over the way Big John was taking advantage of him. Finally he
could stand it no longer. He signed up for bodybuilding courses, karate, judo,
and all that good stuff. By the end of the summer, he had become quite strong;
what's more, he felt really good about himself.
So on the next Monday, when Big John once again got on the bus
and said "Big John doesn't pay!," the driver stood up, glared back at the
passenger, and screamed, "And why not?"
With a surprised look on his face, Big John replied, "Big John has a
bus pass."
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