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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
"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.
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
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps shareholders aren't happy, but screw 'em. Why should a company be considered a "failure" if it doesn't rake in gonzo billions? If you can make money, pay your employees decently, and you have happy customers, you are not a failure - despite whatever Wall Street jerky boys in their pinstripe monkey suits would have you believe. How did it come to pass that world domination is our only criteria for success?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
That's Funny, Salon trades at .01 and they are commenting on someone elses viability and business plan.
Steve Case made a brilliant move with Time Warner. He used his hyper inflated stock value to buy a company with real sustainable assets. Sure they have experianced massive deflation, just like ALL internet related stocks. But they now have enourmous resources and infrastructure to leverage.
AOL is not for geeks, it's for new users, non-techies and grandma's. And there are a lot of Grandma's out there.
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?
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
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...
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 --
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
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 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
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%.
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.
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."
... the Mom and Pop ISP user ducks under it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't finished tiling my office with AOL CDs.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I'd like to chat with some lemurs.
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.
Is because I write "Return to Sender" on every CD they send to my house.
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
"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
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.
Well-prepared tech support scripts are a Good Thing. Tech support staffers need more people skills that they need tech skills. If you assume that the folks working the phones don't have the skills and experience to be elsewhere actually fixing problems, the script acts as a simple dialogue tree to get the right information from the caller. Without the script, you often have clueless users doing their best to describe a problem for a clueless tech support person.
Once upon a time, I saw a place put Actual Live Techies on the tech support frontlines. Disaster. The customers didn't understand them; they didn't understand the customers. Most callers just gave up after being told, in so many words, "Nothing's wrong. You're the problem."
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
You've brought up another question. Sure, every one refers to them as coasters - but really who actually uses them to sit drinks on? For me, AOL CD's go from my mailbox to my hand and then directly into the trash. I don't even use failed CDR's for putting drinks on. Who does this? Are there really people in the world that are either 1) too cheap to buy real coasters, 2) have no shame at all and prefer to use CD's than no coasters at all? I'd really like to know.
From the article:
It was never really an Internet company. AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.
There is no doubt that this is what aol has become but you are incorrect in how it came about. AOL truly never was an Internet company as you say... but neither was it based on your halfway house idea. This is bullocks.
It was not started as a buffer for the internet.. it as started without the internet... a subscription bbs. These things really did exist.... The internet killed the BBS.. aol is just hanging on longer then most.
'..that kernel panicked like a nun in a crack house!'
Save untold millions by stopping the flood of aol cdroms, and then lower prices to $15 a month?
The dial-up ISP I used, access4less.net, only charged $6 a month. Juno charges $10. I think AT&T charges about $14.
MSN charges $23, but they only get away with that by giving away $400 off the price of new computer.
So maybe AOL isn't price competitive anymore?
AOL has always marketed itself by encouraging the idea that the internet is a big bad scary place that is full of potential harm and is difficult to navigate. The term "half-way house" used in the post is right on.
They have been very successful in particular with older, non-technical folks. For example, both my parents and in-laws use AOL and every time I suggest that they could get everything they need on the internet for less money and less hassle by dumping AOL, they look at me like I'm insane.
What bugs me the most about AOL is that they disguise who their true customers are. They want people to believe that when they sign up for an account, they are the customer. In fact, those poor schmucks are simply fodder for the legions of advertisers and commercial interests that are AOL's true customers.
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.