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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.'"
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.
...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.
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
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
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.
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'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"
Yeah, except even the one in Spazebo, North Dakota is busy at 3:46 a.m. on a Tuesday.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
I though AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS...
Precisely. In fact, the first experience I had with AOL was when some guy was touting it as "way better" than the local BBS's we were all dialing up to. We thought he was a freak for paying for access. Oh, how times change.
The article goes on to make the excellent point that this was always the real point of AOL, until it got taken over by MBAs in the mid-late 90s and they started implementing the "herd of eyeballs for sale" mentality In fact, this might be the *real* root cause of AOL's problems: a shift of focus from custom to advertiser, a plummet in the ad rates, and no corresponding reason to stick around.
Ultimately I think AOL will be doomed even if they can turn it around and create an excellent customer experience, because as much as it's "a halfway house" between people and the internet, it's a full-service one: it takes a lot of resources to maintain community features people like. As they shift to lower-margin broadband connections, I think they'll just be squeezed out. Unless broadband wholesale prices are regulated *way* down.
As much as I hate to draw the parallel, sites like SlashDot are actually starting to fill the need that AOL used to in this regard, albeit on a smaller scale. Especially with the new friend/foe system and the journaling, all we need is "/.IM" for this to be a full-featured nerd community a-la AOL forums. Of course, slashdot isn't immune from the need to make a profit, and I'm not entirely clear on how they're proceeding towards that end. Guess time will tell. But it seems like AOL might not be a significant part of the picture for much longer.
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.
Your point about technical support is good, but the idea that the majority of bandwidth is used by "granny watching Flash sites" is absurd. By far the majority of bandwidth used in residential networks is for MP3s and pirated software/games.
Your average 100KB flash intro doesn't compare to a 4.5MB MP3 file or 500MB ISO of the latest game.
I've had an AOL account for over 9 years. I don't want to change my email address. I'm too far away for DSL. I don't have (or want to pay for) cable. For what I need home access for, AOL is sufficient.*
Never underestimate the power of inertia. I *like* the fact that I have a few addresses that haven't changed in years and are still useful.
Over the last year or so, the spam in my AOL mailbox peaked, then has dropped off considerably compared to the trash that increasingly infects my other paid, free and work (#$&%!) accounts. I don't know whether or not they have it "under control" but something is working better. YMMV.
[* Every now and then I run into people that say that I need to get an account on a real ISP because *their* ISP is so cool and blocks out AOL email to reduce spam. My usual answer, when I'm being polite, is to suggest getting a better ISP.]
--- "It annoyed me, so I fixed it." -- Tom's First Principle of Engineering
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."
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.
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? ]=-
"One way that many people get AOL for free is that they install one of those thousand hour free CDs and then when the given number of free months has expired, they call up to cancel...."
And that doesn't take into account true "churn," from those who won't put up with AOL for even free. For every "new" subscriber (are they still counting every name under the same account?), how many leave? When is the last time you spoke with someone who left AOL for a "real" ISP who was sorry about their decision? Most of the comments I hear are along the lines of "I don't know why I didn't do it sooner."
Blanket marketing (the likes of which we may have never seen before - you can't open a subpoena without finding an AOL startup disk inside), customer laziness, and good old FUD are what get and keep AOL subscribers.
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
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.
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!
Not really. What happens, is that those free hours are so long that you forget when your cutoff is and they start charging your credit card automatically. Then it takes you 3 days on the phone to get them to drop you.
/jmr02/
Then they try to trick you by saying they'll drop you if you fill out their AOL credit application. True story. My wifes coworker was gonna fill out the form till she spotted him. Lucky for him, she told him no to, and to call them back.
JoeR
McDonald's isn't in the burger business - it's in the softdrink business. McDonald's is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) resellers of Coke. Where's more profit?
$1 burger that costs 35 cents to make?
$1.19 drink and 9 cents of syrup/water?
creation science book
While I hate the interface designed for idiots, AOL does have certain merits, not least the fact it works from practically anywhere in the world. Most of the time I dial up and minimize the thing and fire up Mozilla or Netscape (which have AOL to thank for their existence BTW). In my trips around the US, I really appreciate the ease that it allows me to dial up some local number and avoid being screwed for long distance calls.
As I say I tend to use AOL more like a conventional, but ubiquitous ISP, but there have been many times when I've turned to their content too. AOL has some truly excellent content which, unlike a lot of sites on the web is tailored for immediate access. As one example, I find the recipe site particularly useful.
So really I believe it does have a place. Lot's of people really don't give a crap about learning what PPP is, or other nonsense. They just want to talk to their buddies, chat online or whatever. While AOL is not unique, it does make all this stuff easy and that's the reason people use it. If power users prefer bookmarks and web browsers, then they're probably not the kind of people AOL is pitched at anyway.
"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?
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.
I didn't say the majority, I said you'd have more.
Think about this, you have 10 newbies that don't use bandwidth at all on your cable segment, and you, who download gigs of music everyday. Those 10 other people are screwing you out of bandwidth that they wouldn't miss if they were on a dialup to AOL.
If you are on DSL, and have garunteed bandwidth, they are helping you keep your cost down, so it all depends on which side of the argument you are on.
Starbucks may sell "awful coffee", but either you're not much older than I am, or you're very discriminating indeed when it comes to coffee quality.
My father remarked the other day that when he first came to America from Brazil, almost 40 years ago, America had no tradition of fine coffee at all. Everywhere you went, the best coffee you could find was still ass, by Brazilian standards.
Nowadays, even Denny's serves drinkable coffee, and places like Starbucks serve beverages to satisfy all but the most demanding connoisseur.
American coffee is several orders of magnitude better than it was a generation ago, according to the anecdotal evidence at my disposal. So cheer up! At least Starbucks is fronting its empire-building agenda with a real product. Having fried my share of McNuggets, I can't say the same thing for McDonald's.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
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.
'...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.
McDonald's Corp. is the largest landowner in the world. They own more land the Cathloic Church, and usually their property is some of the most valuable in a city, located at prime intersections. The resturant is just something to put on the land while it gains value. Ray Kroc was a genius...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Since they give the power to AOL, which is one of the biggest foes of Evil Microsoft.
I want tender love now!
Elkobim