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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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"
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
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!
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
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.
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."
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
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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
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.