Slashdot Mirror
Has AOL Lost Its Sex Drive?
TheViewFromTheGround writes "Why have the years since the merger with Time Warner been so hard on America Online? Michael Wolff, a consultant who advised Time Warner not to buy AOL in the early 90's, says that the the big problem is Time Warner's denial of AOL's core value: a monopoly on dirty chat. The argument says that AOL was successful because they had a critical mass of people and that it skillfully marketed talking dirty by appearing to be family friendly. Now, the old media bedfellow is pushing AOL to stop its pimping ways."
and they're what makes people leave AOL in droves.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Time Warner's cable interests carry as much softcore porn as the next guy and that don't seem to bother them none.
AOL's problems are market saturation pure and simple. No ISP can grow like AOL and others did in the late 90s and early 00s for ever.
I know the average slashdot reader may find this hard to believe, but not everyone is using the internet to help them masturbate. Mentioning children and family values will be terribly cliched, but they really are still relevent.
So what if AOL is closing some of the more distasteful chat-rooms; perhaps it will improve the quality and performance of the internet for the rest of us.
The reason AOL is losing business is because anyone with half a brain sees that for $29.95 they can get cable or DSL. Once you've gotten a taste of always-on broadband, who would want measly 56k for almost the same price? AOL charges $23.95 for crumby dialup! And anyone can use AOL Instant Messenger to IM their AOL and internet buddies! What are they offering me? Once cable was available in my area I made the switch immediately!
is that in their rush to embrace the Internet they made themselves obsolete. Throughout the early 90's AOL really did provide a lot of value add and made online communities and chatting accessible to the average computer user. By the mid 90's people were still using AOL because it was a safe way to ease into that "WWW thing" everyone was now talking about but still have acess to all that AOL content. Flash forward to the very late 90's and now and AOL has stopped producing anywhere near the amount of content that they used to. All the old cool things like AOL's gaming content just pushes you right back onto the internet. AOL in striving so hard to make sure people could access the internet through them has ceased to have any value beyond that of your basic ISP. All roads from AOL lead out to the internet and eventually most users ask themselves why bother with AOL and its bloated crappy software at all? AOL's user base has "grown up" and the user base which they pull from (newbies) are going to be in shorter and shorter supply as time goes on. Couple that with missing out on being bundled with XP and you see that AOL just don't have that great a future.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
If you really want to boycott, don't get cable, you wouldn't be the first.
The article has an interesting point of view, however I think AOL is failing due to stagnation. The article touches on this a little, AOL hasn't innovated in years. Seriously, no matter how lame AOL is in reality, they did make some great innovations in instant chat. All the new AOL releases over the past 2+ years haven't added much besides a new revision number.
I used to live in a smallish town where AOL offered the best connection speeds over a 56k phone line. So I had an account. Forgive me. I swear, I would connect and immediately minimize, going about my regular internet ways. It was only for bandwidth, I swear.
Anyways,Then I moved to a bigger city and bought broadband. When I called AOL to cancel the account, they assured me I didn't want to do that. Telling me I could still access AOL "Even over the cable modem" for 15 bucks a month. As if the cable modem were some sort of limiting technology or something.
I had to explain it to them in very simple terms...
...the Time Warner people, who know a thing or two about advertising, correctly surmised that advertising was not going to support the Internet. And so the plan was to sell users Time Warner content. (In my personal defense, I kept talking about what a dirty place AOL was -- that the Internet was the porn business. But the feeling seemed to be that, first, I was joking and, second, while new entertainment technologies often started dirty, they soon became much more sanitized and mass-market.) This service, which started in the autumn of 1994 and closed in the spring of 1999, was called Pathfinder and proved two things: Selling Time Warner content on the Internet was pretty much a nonstarter, and the people at Time Warner lacked a certain flair for the Internet. We just don't get it, they said. Which was the essential reason for merging with AOL. [Emphasis mine.]
I'm not sure that Mike's getting it any more than TW. Does anyone with any sense imagine that *this internet thing* is going to fall apart if someone can't figure out how to make money on it with standard advertainment/publimation models? Even in '94. And dirty chat is a killer app?
illegitimii non ingravare
Time Warner had It's A Wonderful Life, AOL had teenagers curious about bondage. Which is worth more?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
And, no, one man's freedom fighter is not another man's terrorist. If you fucking kill civilians -- innocent men, women, and children -- you're a goddamn terrorist.
You should be cautious of such absolutism. Using that argument, the U.S. is a terrorist organization a couple of orders of magnitude more deadly than al Qaeda. Though still a couple orders of magnitude behind Germany and Japan.
The enemies of Democracy are
All the lost sex drive of a serial child molester.
Have they stopped repeatedly screwing their customners in the ass with their poor service, high rates, and popup ads?
No? Then make sure that they register as a sex offender in your state and watch your kids.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
It's a Freedom of Speech thing, dude ... chill out. They have Freedom of Speech which is balanced by your Right to Be Offended.
What turns it into a Really BAD Thing(TM) is that THEY want to exercise THEIR Right to Be Offended at the expense of YOUR Freedom of Speech.
utter rubbish