Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
"Good-bye"
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
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!
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 thought AOL was based on the idea that people need a never-ending supply of drink coasters.
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.
...
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"
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.
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?
...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.
I found him! The origional author of the '*BSD Is Dying' troll!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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
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...
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
> 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 have always thought that AOL was never in the business of selling internet access. It was in the business of selling AOL stock.
Because I own parts of a couple of various businesses, I get a pile of free magazines, including "Inc." "Inc." is for "growing businesses" and "entrepreneurs". Lovely people, those. Unfortunately, the writers at "Inc." are horribly out of synch with real live american small businesses. One example of this was the Inc article where it was discussed how one whould "market" a company for sale. Lo and behold, the company's products and business weren't the interesting thing anymore, the company itself was being marketed. AOL should have been listed in this article as the ultimate example of this. It made the owners of AOL billions.
AOL shareholders had no way to justify the valuation of their ISP/online service based on revenues or expected future profits (the traditional model of valuation). The ISP business is hard: it is low margin, price-sensitive, the barriers to entry are low, it is basically unregulated, and you're at the mercy of the ILECs. AOL has all these problems -- it's not just other ISPs.
"Ordinary" dial-up ISPs might sell privately today for $100-$150 a subscriber, and maybe $250-$350 during the bubble. AOL was valued at about $2,500. AOL didn't run from that -- it brayed repeatedly about how its size and scale were so valuable and about how controlling the onramps to the internet was so valuable. But they feared that the game would be up before that value could be locked in.
So...faced with the prospect of having all their paper wealth evaporate, Case et al ginned up the idea of using a stock purchase deal to buy some legitimate assets. This made perfect sense, and I argued with some friends that more tech bubble babies should have done this.
AOL could have bought GM or Chrysler or any number of major banks. Instead, they had to buy something with a tenuous connection to an ISP: a media company with a bunch of cable assets. Bingo. Content and a means to deliver (at some as-yet-undetermined date) high speed access and new services.
As with most ill-conceived mergers of large companies, the big thing was "synergy." If you are unfamiliar with it, "synergy" is the modern financial philosopher's stone that auto-magically turns horseshit into honey. (Look for HP/Compaq to have either horseshit or honey coming out of its ears sometime in the next couple of years -- I suspect you know where my bet is).
AOL essentially pimped itself so well that it fooled the stodgy old dorks at Time Warner (who feared and still fear that technology will impoverish them) that not only would AOL save them, it would make everyone filthy rich. It didn't. In essence, AOL gave some (not so) magic beans in exchange for the Time Warner cash cows. Time Warner was fleeced. They probably lost more in the stock market bubble than anyone else in the world.
I wonder if former Time/Warner stock holders feel like idiots for approving the merger.
What do you think?
Note: I have no problems with how any of this went down -- everyone involved had smart advisors and lawyers and accountants. Time Warner people aren't sympathetic victims -- they just made a horrible decision about a business that they just really didn't understand, IMHO. I do not consider this to be an indictment of AOL or Time Warner. It's just an interesting story to me.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
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%.
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
I haven't finished tiling my office with AOL CDs.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I'd like to chat with some lemurs.