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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
half of the web?
I don't know where you surf, buddy, but I am using mozilla every day and maybe 1% of the sites doesn't work.
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.
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/
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!
from what I found working as a tech rep for an ISP was that most people don't understand that the web is more than one or two pages.
They are VERY confused when they get a new computer and see MSN.com as their homepage and not www.attbi.com (in this case). When ATTBI made the switch from excite, people were NOT pleased that home.excite.com no longer worked. I had TONS of calls during the "changeover" and most of them were people wanting to know where "the Internet went".
So, whether or not some parts of AOL/the Internet went, most AOL users probably won't even know its missing.
These people are comfortable w/in-house content it seems.
Hell, most of the people wanted cable modems just to use AOL faster. That's it. Scary.
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.
How quickly people forget that at one time AOL tried to "beat" the Internet.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
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
Alternatively, I have found thousands of sites that bombard IE with popup ads, and Ad-aware reports that much more nefarious activity is happening as well.
In this comparison, it is blatantly obvious that IE is the inferior product which fails almost completely in its attempts to meet my expectations. If AOL can provide a web browser that does not include 1,001 ways to violate my security, require third party software to repair the damage, and inundate me with advertisements, then that is a marvelous advantage for them and for their users.
If, however, you are more concerned with preserving advertisers revenues and consider the end users' rights and privacy to be an inconvenience, then your comment is right on.
Long live microsoft trolls, eh?
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.
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.
I'm scratching my head trying to think to a site other than that hotmail -> preferences -> we're going to spam you now options panel, and with 1.2 that does work. Furthurmore pop-up blocking are just the kind of killer feature that they would want and a change like that will give them publicity and a few of those oh so hard to come by geek bonus points of which they are now entirly barren. Now is the perfect time for them to start including Mozilla code.
I stole this Sig
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?
You are clearly not an AOL user. Most users, especially AOL users know absolutely nothing about security and don't care (and quite frankly... I agree with them). Third party add-ons are an easy one shot deal. And, AOL's versino of Netscape/Mozilla will not include the popup killer. So, the only obvious difference to the average AOL user will be that a good number of pages "don't work" because of DHTML and CSS standards.
Rights and privacy? Jesus. We're talking about the web here. Get a grip. If you're so paranoid about some web site knowing that the last web site you visited was http://angylesbiantransgendermidgets.com, then stick with Mozilla, by all means. You are in the minority, which has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on AOL (since that IS the topic of this thread).
They could simply just start giving away more hours for free.
Maybe 1,000,000 free hours*!
* for the first month only...
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?
I've never found a site that doesn't work with Mozilla.
You've obviously never been to www.microsoft.com
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
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
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.
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...
"think that none of the ISPs actually run the fiber that your data goes on from city to city."
AOL, Comcast, @Home, UUnet, MCI Worldcom, Digex, Qwest... amoung many others that run their own networks from city to city. @Home had a lovely map of the fiber they owned, including OC-3's, OC-12's, etc criss-crossing the country. Anyone got a link to that old picture?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> I've never found a site that doesn't work with Mozilla.
.. lets just say that Mozilla is no more unbreakable than Oracle. ;)
I use Mozilla, but claiming infailability
I've definately run into sites that break under Mozilla (my web banking interface, for one.)
At any rate, the user goes on perception, not truth. The user perceives popups are an unfortunate neccessity of life, and doesn't know whats going on under the hood (as reported by Adaware.)
So to them, a few more sites break under Mozilla than under IE, so IE wins. Thats not trolling, thats pointing out that people still are not educated enough to understand the difference.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Uum, because those people still with AOL CAN'T GET a better, faster, cheaper online experience.
Believe it or not, AOL is the best option for some people in some places -- I know because I grew up in South Dakota, and some rural areas in the U.S. have pretty sparse/crappy ISP options. And the fact that AOL is the number one ISP in the U.S. among dozens of ISP's doesn't mean much because their total user-base is so relatively tiny...
...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.
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 ----
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.
What sites are you visiting?
I'm willing to bet that the number of websites that work in Mozilla is directly proportional to the number of non-Microsoft products the user runs.
Since you're running one (or more) non-Microsoft product, you're more likely to be part of a culture that shuns Microsoft. People that run non-MS software are more likely to use websites that cater to tech-oriented crowd. And those websites are less likely to build their pages with proprietary FrontPage/IE extensions.
And just to show I'm not trolling:
I run Debian/testing on a P166 laptop, with X 3.3.6 and GNOME 1.4. When I'm away from that machine, I use SSH to get a terminal on it, and VNC to get a display. I also wrote a page on how to get it to work on that model laptop, and submitted it to Linux-Laptop.net. Think of that combination, and let me tell you I'm dedicated to OSS.
What's this Submit thingy do?
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.
all we need is "/.IM" for this to be a full-featured nerd community a-la AOL forums
:) ...
...
Early AOL IM:
1: Hi
2: Hello
1: Are you over 16?
2: Yes
1: What are you wearing?
Early Slashdot IM:
1: D00d
2: Whassup?
1: You on Gentoo or Debian?
The only problem I have ever had with Mozilla is when validating my CSS content. (And it is of course, not even remotely the fault of Mozilla.)
In order to get the 'cursor' property to work in IE and Mozilla, I have to specify both the correct and incorrect values: 'pointer' (proper), and 'hand' (IE). The css validator tells me it's wrong, but there's nothing I can do about it!
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
No, I don't go to www.microsoft.com. Yes, that was obviously a statement based on my perception. Be that as it may, I have never stumbled upon a website that Mozilla didn't like. I don't doubt that they exist.
I'm quite certain that AOL will not include the java popup disable that is present in the true Mozilla. They are, however, boosting the Mozilla project, and the Mozilla project includes such a feature. Therefore, AOL is indirectly promoting browsers that have this feature, and this facilitates a potential future avenue for AOL users to upgrade to the real Mozilla.
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
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?
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? ]=-
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
Third party add-ons are a one shot deal that compensate for the utter failures of the original program to deliver an acceptable product. That Ad-aware has a need to exist is a testament to the corporate-minded, user abusing design that went into IE.
I am quite interested in your information regarding Mozilla and the ability to render DHTML and CSS standards. Can you provide a link? Implicit in this request is that you provide a link describing how IE does conform to these standards.
"Rights and privacy, get a grip, blah blah." Yes, thank you, it is clear that we are different species. I am a critical thinker, a freedom and privacy loving American, a voter, and a citizen. You are a marketing recipient, a consumer, and a revenue source. IE fits your species perfectly, and more glory to you! By distracting the corporate greed, I am marginalized, made into a minority, and able to slip by in a niche market of similar society. Am I wrong to be concerned with these issues, as you imply? Perhaps, but I strongly suggest that the United States would not have documents such as the Bill of Rights if my concerns were not integral to the identity of this country.
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.
> 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
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.
Uhh, it seems to me many buisinesses have standardized with Netscape due to security issues.
Of course a lot of users still use IE, but whatever.
I personally go through spurts of it being REALLY important that everyone can view my web site, then I realize few people surf any more and I don't know how many hits in the past year I've gotten. Personal web pages are like the great american novel that everyone works on but no-one reads or actually gets published. (Bad analogy, I know).
Dan
I haven't finished tiling my office with AOL CDs.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Slashdot isn't being bankrupted by greedy executives who want Jaguars, Mansions , and Cocaine. AOL is. You aren't even comparing apples to oranges, but apples to rocks.
How ya like dat?
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....
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.
You mean Slate, not Salon.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
For all of you AOLusers out there - version 8.0 will be pop-up free [News.com].
-- jimmycarter
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.
"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
(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
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.
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.
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.
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"
>> ...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
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.
Ummm...Mosaic was the first graphical browser. (Other browsers predated it. I still remember trying to "browse" the CERN site on a 9-inch Mac Classic over a 14.4k line in '91 or '92.) If you want to learn how it sort of morphed into Netscape, the history must be somewhere on the Netscape site.
Some of the Mosaic code ended up in Spyglass. MS bought Spyglass and used the code in early versions of IE.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What will middle america do now to access wal mart.com?
They block Mozilla, but they accept most versions of Nutscrape 4.x...strange. If there's a way to change the user-agent string in Mozilla (it's not exposed anywhere in preferences...ideas, anyone?), maybe you could access their site that way. I was able to use Wells Fargo's online-banking site with Lynx (!) by telling it to send an IE user-agent string. (Wells Fargo used to be much more anal about browsers than it is now. Back when I upgraded from IE 4 to IE 5, I had to wait a couple or three weeks before they decided to allow usage of IE 5. Nowadays, you could use the latest bleeding-edge Mozilla build to log in.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
What makes you think an end user running Mozilla isn't likely to attribute a site that renders improperly to its webmaster? If 99% of the other sites he visits show up properly, why would the 1% of the sites that don't suddenly become the browser's fault? The average user has run across enough sh*tty websites that the incompetence of a site developer isn't regarded as an impossibility.
As for site developers, the only site developers Mozilla is likely to piss off are the lazy fscks who can't be bothered to create clean HTML and CSS. They're the l4m3rz who read Teach Yourself FrontPage in 24 Hours (or something similar) and think that makes them "HTML programmers" (as if HTML were a programming language). I doubt the Mozilla developers are losing too much sleep over them.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Hmm...when the only pages I've run across that don't work mostly fall under *.microsoft.com (and even then, it's only a handful of them, like Windows Update), just what would you consider a "working browser?"
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I left AOL because, as a regular participant in the online discussion forums, I got REAL DAMN TIRED of some piss-ant, third-party forum admin randomly deleting messages without rhyme or reason. Add to this the frustration of what seemed like a never-ending cycle of changes to the forum formats and the way that you responded to messages, it just wasn't worth the hassle any more.
Of course, then I made what turned out to be a costly mistake, using Qwest as my internet provider. I've had Earthlink for a while, and aside from news servers that seem to spas out on a regular basis, I don't have that much to complain about.
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.
As a customer you have the choice of buying your own subscriber module for $500 (which I've done) or lease one for some additional amount of money per month, and then here you can get a guy to do the installation for $100 (it needs to be mounted on the roof).
Friend of mine is a longtime ELN employee, and when queried about the Co$ 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!
You made a limp-wristed attempt to change the topic from IE's bent-over-ass-up security failings with Flash and Real Audio. A for effort. You may or may not be aware that neither of these technologies are integral to using the internet. In fact, in all my life, I have never once subjected myself to the travesty that is Real Audio, and I can't say that I'm worse off for it.
You mention that you believe that IE is the standard. That's fine, you can also believe that rocks fall faster than paper clips if you like. You have made more than a few comments that have implied a serious disdain for a competitive market, privacy for individual citizens, and limiting the powers of corporations and advertisers. You have every right to believe these things, however your right to dissent (assuming you are American) exists only because those who built this nation disagreed with you and felt it necessary to preserve that right.
You are quite wrong that nobody is out to get you, or rather, you misinterpret the meaning of that. Nobody is out to get you, but someone is certainly out to get the millions of people that are just like you. If you think that the mass media delivered to your eyeballs through cable TV tells you anything remotely close to the truth in issues of international relations, then you have already been had. You have made it clear that you trust unfailingly in the benevolence of billion dollar corporations. The suspension of good sense that is necessary to do so is staggering. No one has ever made billions of dollars by being benevolent, and the fact that a corporation has billions of dollars is a testament to their lack of benevolence. Despite this, you trust that they don't have any plans to extort more of your financial livelihood for their profit and your bad luck.
Palladium's developers, Microsoft security experts, garment industry sweatshops, the World Bank which extorts developing nations, Enron, Tyco, Firestone Tires, the makers of the Chevrolet Corvair, Thalidomide's inventors, Phillip Morris, Little Debbie, fashion magazines, oil companies, and more are glad that you hold your beliefs close to your heart. None of these groups were out to get you, but rather millions of people just like you. They have all been wildly successful. Paranoid? No. Critical? Absolutely, and that attitude is overwhelmingly justified by history and the millions of people who have suffered horribly for someone else's dollar. But maybe it's just me. Maybe you happily drive your SUV on Firestones, smoke like a chimney, cram your face with Twinkies, shovel your money off to sweatshop profits, ingest drugs that cause widespread birth defects, invest your life savings with criminals, and trust Microsoft to do you a favor. Way to play, Ace, I guess I'm the one who's crazy...
Since they give the power to AOL, which is one of the biggest foes of Evil Microsoft.
I want tender love now!
Elkobim
Technet does not work properly with Mozilla. This is not because of a problem with Mozilla, but because Microsoft's servers purposely serve up a broken page. To prove it, go to XULPlanet.com and download Prefbar. Try to search the KB on Technet. Notice how everything is in fat Times Roman and you can only search by article ID? Now change the user agent to IE 6. Works pretty well now, doesn't it? Feel free to report it to the webmaster. I did two months ago when the KB suddenly stopped working and it still doesn't work.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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"