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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.'"
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.
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.