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AOL Reports Its First Drop In Subscribers
Flamesplash writes "Yahoo! is running this AP story about AOL's first drop in subscribers. 170,000 US subscribers have left AOL in their fourth quarter of 2002, apparently due to users becoming more comfortable with broadband connections. It should be noted though that 'AOL has said it has stopped simply signing up new customers for the sake of counting them.'"
Isn't that like saying you made X number of dollars, when you only made Y?
Oh yeah...
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Oh no! How are we going to easily identify the scum of the Internet without @aol.com on the email address!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
We won't get as many free coasters anymore?
Multiply by 10. I don't know what their total user base is, but if your estimate is right, then thats 2.0% of their user base, which is a significant sum.
It should be noted though that AOL has said it has stopped simply signing up new customers for the sake of counting them.
Is this an admission that the hundreds of CDs each and everyone here will have recieved were just a stunt to get the numbers up?
One Evil Empire beginning to crumble, one more to go....
Here's a better article from the Washington Post.
It should be noted that, 'Despite the small decline in the number of AOL subscribers in the United States during the fourth quarter, the total number of subscribers grew enough during the other nine months of the year to enable America Online to post a 1.2 million net increase in customers during 2002.'
Also, AOL is still by far the number one ISP with 26.5 million U.S. customers to MSN's 9 million.
The world is finally coming to an end!
Seriously tho, another large company's stock taking a plunge isn't a good thing..
...carpet bombing the world with their '100 HOURS FREE TRIAL!!!' CD
"ding-dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch! the witch is dead!" (define dead declining)
They have a nicely written, in-depth piece on AOL's new head master, Dick Parsons, as he deals with the trials and tribulations of running such a large, well-known company as AOL.
Non-registration, direct link version: Tests Keep Coming for AOL Time Warner's Well-Tested Chief
*nix.org -- BSD, Linux, OS X, & Solaris community
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Of course, I could be wrong...
I think that a few of you can relate to this: I don't make a heck of alot of money off my single, constant IT job. This forces me to do alot of consulting for everyone from small businesses to "Joe User". Joe User still doesn't have or need much understanding about computers, and still prefers the simplistic experience that is AOL. Until another major ISP can offer the ease of use that AOL can for a significantly lower cost (unlike MSN), then most AOL userrs have no incentive to switch.
I've heard 30 million as an approximation of their whole user base. If that's true, then 170000 is only 0.6%.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I'm suprised more people didn't report leaving AOL due to suicidal, homicidal, or psychotic thoughts whenever they went online...
For its part, AOL has said it has stopped simply signing up new customers for the sake of counting them.
Well, this disproves the "To them, you are not just a number" Theory.
Signed,
24783
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
Or a lot of 'Vacation Signups' (i.e. sign up for an AOL account when you're on vacation to have access , but then you cancel when you get home)
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
AOL (as stated in the article) climbed to a user base of more than 35 million .. which is approximately 0.48% of their total customer base .. but it IS a huge number .. 170,000 and decreasing probably
so thats 170,000 out of 35 mil
not a big number just saying "less than 1 percent"
- mescaline - its the only way to fly -
170,000 people are the Advanced/Newhouse subscribers are no longer part of AOL/Time Warner. Newhouse is the Indianapolis, Orlando , Tampa/ST Pete Time Warner subscribers. When Time Warner was going thru the massive growth in the mid 90's they merged with Advanced/Newhouse cable out of Colorado. Part of the deal was that Newhouse can pull out of the merger if conditions get bad. About 3 months ago there was an anouncement that Advanced/Newhouse would control the above TW markets but still keep the TW name. But They Tecnically are Newhouse cable . I should Know I have some dealings with the cable Industry.
d =5 28&e=1&cid=528&u=/ap/20030131/ap_on_hi_te/aol_subs cribers
"AOL said the results also reflect the deconsolidation of certain cable systems pursuant to the restructuring of the cable partnership between Time Warner Entertainment Company L.P. and Advance/Newhouse.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&nci
Isn't that like saying you made X number of dollars, when you only made Y?
The accountants from Enron had to find a job somewhere, you know?
I think it is rude of you to insult them like that
170,000 people are the Advanced/Newhouse subscribers are no longer part of AOL/Time Warner. Newhouse is the Indianapolis, Orlando , Tampa/ST Pete Time Warner subscribers. When Time Warner was going thru the massive growth in the mid 90's they merged with Advanced/Newhouse cable out of Colorado. Part of the deal was that Newhouse can pull out of the merger if conditions get bad. About 3 months ago there was an anouncement that Advanced/Newhouse would control the above TW markets but still keep the TW name. But They Tecnically are Newhouse cable . I should Know I have some dealings with the cable Industry.
d =5 28&e=1&cid=528&u=/ap/20030131/ap_on_hi_te/aol_subs cribers
"AOL said the results also reflect the deconsolidation of certain cable systems pursuant to the restructuring of the cable partnership between Time Warner Entertainment Company L.P. and Advance/Newhouse.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&nci
Proud Member of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Atoms. Save a atom, use recyled electrons in your message
At '27,99 a month in the uk, its poor value for money. Most people I know have released that AOL is crap and they have switched a real isp.
(30 seconds later)Jeebus! I finally got it to parse: "AOL used to sign up new members, not because it would increase revenue, but because it would increase their total number of subscribers (which presumably had some marketing value on its own). They have stopped this, and now expect to make money from their users." Someone, please explain the concept of scope ambiguity to the author of that article!!!
AOL's recent ad campaign for their AOL 8.0 service has to be the direct reason for the drop in subscribers. Let's do the math:
In one scene, where a "dad" talks about setting up the parental controls for his "kids," a shot of the screen is shown with three users listed. The first user in the list (name unknown, and doesn't matter) is shown as having Adult access. The second user on this list is the key. First of all, the user name is HappyAOLUser, and is shown as having Older Teen access. First of all, what Teenager in their right(?) mind would use HappyAOLUser as their screen name? None. And secondly, is there such a thing as a Happy AOL User? I haven't met any...
Here's the big detractor. Their offer boasts 1,025 hours free for the first 45 days. Let's do the math. There are 24 hours in a day, right? OK. So, let's multiply that by 45. The answer is 1,080 hours. Now, we subtract from that the 1,025 hours offered for free. We get 55 hours. Divide those 55 hours by the original 45 days, and you get 1.2222222r. So, in order to use up all of the 1,025 hours in 45 days, a single AOL user would only be able to get 1.22222r hours of sleep per day in the 45 day period.
Simply put, either the user doesn't get to use all of the free hours, or they die from sleep deprivation trying to get them all in.
Couple this with the slowly growing demand for broadband, AOL's lack of local servers (resulting in long distance bills for some users), and the frequent busy signals encountered, you have your reason for people migrating away from AOL.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
From http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1023-983012. html:
...
Microsoft's MSN Internet service reported zero net subscriber growth in the fourth quarter of 2002, holding steady at 9 million subscribers despite the backing of a $350 million advertising campaign for its new MSN 8 service. The company said the lack of growth was offset by a shift to higher-paying customers as various incentive offers came to a close in the last three months of the year.
Earthlink, the third-largest ISP in the United States, has also seen declines in its dial-up business. The company this week announced massive cutbacks at the company as it moved to outsource its customer-support call centers.
The number of free subscribers on the service dropped from 2.9 million in the third quarter to 2.5 million in the fourth.
So are they all moving to the butterfly, or to popup blocker land, or have they wised up and are (doubtful) speaking easy? At the very least we know they aren't finishing the internet...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Yes, this is a turning point in the war...
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
AOL is losing lots of customers to services like speakeasy because the speed and support are better.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
When they upped the Bring Your Own Access plan to $14.95/month is when I dropped after subscribing for years. I found four girlfriends and countless dates on AOL, and they were mostly smart college girls that went to my university or a nearby one. I also found VB programmer chicks, which are fun to talk to for a few minutes, and one even gave me a job lead. But $15/mo on top of my broadband bill is too much.
Yes and no. As a Speakeasy customer, I can say that you're right that the speed is better, but you're dead wrong when you say the support is better. I've never had worse support from an ISP than I've had from Speakeasy.
I've got to start buying my frisbees again?
~D:
AOL is a national-available service for crying-out-loud!
Sure, many people may complain about some time of the day when access is 20% to 50% slower, but AOL lets its users roam!
Broadband is a local service that you can't get up and get access to in another territory! I would subscribe to AOL, but they built their network using Linux and did not create a Linux-client for their PROPRIETARY networking protocol. AOL could be better, like Netzero or Juno, but perhaps they should be a little lighter on the FREEWARE subscriptions because my calculator shows they are passing-on-the-cost-of-freeware to its subscribers.
AOL *gasp*
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
...given the events of the day.
no wonder it's number one." What a terrible indictment of the American people.
Anyways, I recently started blocking all email from AOL and Hotmail. (None of the people I know use them.) My spam dropped by over half.
AOL are a large international ISP (or IAP in legal terms) whose product is exempt from VAT in Britain, allowing them some headway in undercutting their rivals. They offer an unmetered dialup service from (virtually) any UK address although metering may be involved if your phone line is provided by one of the more unscrupulous telco's (e.g. the ones in many university halls of residence).
They do not require you to use proprietary email or browser software. They do not disconnect you after a period of inactivity. They do not block any ports, although they transparently re-route outgoing SMTP traffic. Their services are about equal or slightly better in performance than FreeServe (now that's an evil company if ever there was one). Having said all this, their service is occasionally completely shit, connecting at a snails pace and dropping you into limbo usually in the middle of a fraught deathmatch. Most of the time it is OK however.
Apparently, allowing non-computer-literate people to use the internet (or at least the pertinent popular-interest subset thereof) is some kind of deeply offensive crime in the eyes of some technical people. A few years ago there was an arguable basis for such objections, but now it seems rather like snotty received prejudice. Especially when you consider that AOL is the cheapest (or only) option for unmetered internet access in some parts of this country.
Their much-maligned corporate anthropomorphisation, Connie, is played on television by model Rachel Willis, who is the sister of one of my ex-flatmates.
IMO, AOL never made 'access the mass internet' their selling point. (I heard that with 8.0 you can't minimize the AOL and open up IE to access sites) Instead they emphasized on instant messages, and exclusive AOL chats and games...stuff the kiddies like. Now the AOL users are getting older, and probably now prefer better connectivity than all the time-wasting games. They dont want their hands held anymore. Perhaps users have been enlightened to using URLS and google instead of "AOL keyword"(tm)
$cat
They lost $99,000,000,000 last year! Their yearly revenue is 1/9th of this; their total market capitalization is only half of this.
This is an unrecoverable situation, Steve Case and Ted Turner knew it and bailed.
AOL Enron Worldcom Global Crossing Dot Com.
A rather old cartoon, but it makes scence
Dad vs. AOL
YarrRrr
That's like... what... 20 usenet trolls?
Karma: Non-Heinous
Jon Stewart said this on the Daily Show thursday.
"AOL is an internet provider that can't control spam. They're on version 8 and they haven't figured out that I don't need my mortgage refinanced or my penis enlarged"
The only things AOL hasn't been advertising are the things people could actually use, like popup and spam blockers, and other reasons I switched to mozilla, not to mention standards compliance. No one cares about parental controls or more smileys for instant messenger. People are finally realizing that AOL's browser and email, etc. isn't as good as other stuff out there.
Its also slow
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
I can think of several that need to go.
Teach all your computer illiterate friends and relatives to use broadband. If you can.
but at least you said "I heard that..." instead of just repeating the FUD you were told like most people seem to do.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Amazing. What's the choice a home user has when coming to near-by computer store for byuing new home PC! 1 Ghz PC is a history. Typical HDD is not less than 36GB. 1GB of RAM is no surprise anymore... And "the number one American ISP" is still selling you dial-up access at speed I had in Russia 7 years ago. Amazing.
And pay attention on what they advertise: email, search, surfing - all features are not unique for AOL but belong to Internet as a whole.
I don't see AOL doing any investments to improve structuraly their product/service offers. I thing that their strategy is just to take as much money as they can from dial-up and then to invest money to some business that would be (or already is) absolutely unrelated to ISP market.
Another explanation I see that AOL is still in business is in well known fact that an average American is ignoring everything new as long as possible (compare to Europe or South-East Asia). I won't be wonder if at some day US govt will make a law shutting down dial-up for home users - just to help them with broadband (and to help broadband companies).
AOL is "the looser number one" on American ISP market.
Less is more !
Aside from the fact that AOL is the -most expensive- dialup service I've seen, at a staggering $23.90/month, I mean, even the "Bring your own access" plan at $14.95/month is a rip off, what service to they really offer other then a slightly enhanced version of AOL.com
Couldn't one argue that the demise of the AOL monster could cause a boom in the ISP industry as 36 some-odd million people desperately search for a new ISP? Mom-and-pop ISPs could stay in business, mid-level ISPs could afford to roll out more and better broadband, and lowly tech support personnel will be able to keep their jobs and continue to teach old ladies how to reconfigure their Dial-Up Networking.
This could also have an evolutionary effect. The less capable ISPs will crumble under the huge increase in bandwidth and modem usage, while the ones better suited to survive will prosper and flourish in their influx of new capital and customers.
The bankruptcy and shut-down of AOL would also release thousands of IT geeks into the newly-created job market to help these smaller ISPs to ride the wave and help create the next generation of the Internet.
Perhaps one day, with a little help from AOL, the world will be a better place. At least the online one.
"apparently due to users becoming more comfortable with broadband connections."
That's such a great euphamism for users....
"...getting sick of uncontrollable spam"
"...growing tired of a 56k line moving at 33.6k"
"...finding out that instant messaging can be done outside of AOL"
"...discovering that $23.90 per month is a ripoff for a dial-up service"
"...learning that you can get on and off line without clicking 'no thanks' to advertising"
"...finally realizing that they can hookup up to high speed access for another 5 bucks a month without having to deal with bulky client software"
"...trying to set up 'parental controls' to monitor their children, only to find out that it's not a replacement for watching what you kids do"
"...finally getting sick of a TOS policy that amounts to nothing more than idiotic bullshit (I CAN TYPE IN CAPS AND NOT GET KICKED OFFLINE!!)"
I could go on. sadly.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Oops, I see we have an AOL subscriber here.
Just curious, is it still called AMERICA online in Europe and Latin America? I can understand if they're including Compuserve's numbers as well, but using one country's name in your company's name doesn't seem like a good global business model to me, but on the other hand LAOL does seem to roll off the tongue...
I disagree with the bad support business. I've never had a problem with speakeasy, except that sometimes (during the weekends) you may end up waiting 20 to 30 minutes on hold for a support personnel to help you. Of course, If I remember correctly, AOL support took much much longer the one time I call them with something as "simple" as a stolen login password.
Also lots of people used AOL because they had more dialup numbers than anyone including Compu$erve (The original use of $ in spoofing tech company names based on their formerly multiple-dollars-per-hour billing schemes, for those too young or oblivious to know) but that hasn't been true for a long time, so they'll lose customers there.
Third is the internet with training wheels. Users eventually feel confident enough to take them off, and save ten bucks a month in the bargain.
Finally, AOL is moving away from developing their own internal content, and becoming just another ISP. I guess they feel the internet has reached a critical mass of material which makes it useless to develop subscribers-only content. I disagree entirely, I think that this is the time for MORE subscribers-only content, but whatever.
The point is, AOL is losing everything that it was, as they transition toward being just another ISP. At their prices and with the annoyance of having to use their software to get connected, why would people use AOL>
P.S. It's bullshit that they claim they're not signing people up just to claim they have more members. As long as they are still sending out AOL CDs in the mail willy-nilly, and putting them on counters at the post office (USPS-Flavored AOL, could anything be worse? That's like head cheese flavored SPAM) then clearly they are trying to inflate their numbers to artificial levels; They HAVE to know that more people use and discard those things than use and renew. That might not have been true once, I'm sure they had a pretty good retention rate back in the day, but they can't possibly now.
AOL is dragging TW down. It should be cannibalized for its hardware and its customer base and something entirely different done with both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just imagine if, instead, hordes of AOL's former customers were kidnapped by gigantic, vaguely anthropomorphic, highly colorful (poisonous?) butterflies.
I-E-O, O-O. I-E-O, O-O...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
ICQ didn't manage to pull it off, and neither Yahoo Messenger or Microsoft's Messenger have the community required. What's going to happen to AOL IM if AOL goes the way of Compuserv or Prodigy? As a college student I'm a member of a sort of new AIM generation, I've been there from the beginning, I use AIM far more than the phone, I know people who have computers seemingly devoted to AIM and MP3's. I know that if AIM suddenly lost support, or (I shudder to think) became a pay service, people could easily go to a different chat program but I see the exact same thing happening with AIM that happened with Napster. Sure I can use Kazaa, Morpheus, Audiogalaxy, or any of a multitude of other programs to steal my music, but it's nothing like the days of Napster when everything was in one place. There is substantial advantage to having a single community unified by the piece of software it uses.
I'd wager a guess that the percentage of AOL users who unsubscribe is constant. When a user becomes proficient enough to realize that AOL hinders rather than helps their internet experience, they drop it for another, usually less expensive, ISP.
Yes, I once was an AOL user. Back in the dark ages of 1995-1996. Then we wised up and went with a different ISP, and finally now have a DSL. It's a stepwise process.
My guess is that AOL simply ran out of new subscribers, and the unsubscription rate, remaining somewhat constant, has now surpassed the subscription rate.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
My Grandmother used to have AOL and when I installed SuSe 8 with her new cable modem connection, (didn't want to spend $299 on new Windows, and needed something better than 95) it was hell calling up AOL to cancel. She had been a loyal, light user for several years -- any ISP would love to have her, AOL not withstanding. It took at least three calls and several "free 3 month" offers to finally get them to cancel.
These people had her so confused she was even doubting me. They basically said she wouldn't be able to save her AOL contacts, or access the same web sites, on her new service without subscribing to the alternative access plan (bring your own access), to use AOL-only services over her cable connection.
Finally after the 3rd call it was done, not without another fight with another rep. They must get paid based upon how many members they can keep from disconnecting. I remember when I had AOL a long time ago when it was the only ISP with a local number, you could cancel as simply as going to keyword: cancel. Now that seems to have changed, and it speaks in their member retention rates as they fight tooth and nail to hold on to the last of their shrinking subscriber base.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
... and i'll say it again. AOL is a halfway house to the internet for anyone too stupid to use otherwise.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Didn't the words "Don't", "Put", "Eggs", "All", "One" and "Basket" ever occur to them?
No-one ever found stability by cooking the books and following the twisted whims of their investors. Say no to gambling, kids.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
AOL once made leaving so difficult (in terms of the barriers erected against finding the information needed to unsubscribe) that it's not surprising there hasn't been a higher rate of defections. Also I think you could only do it by snail mail. I'm guessing that nowadays they make this information accessible, and perhaps even allow electronic unsubscription, leading to a faster dropout rate than arrival rate.
And once people leave, they don't come back, so their growth is limited by a dwindling pool of victims.
Bait and switch.
msn appeals to gay peeps more than aol, hrmph
Bizarro world definition.
I have heard statistics floated around which indicate that for several years, AOL spent more than $100 to acquire each new member... And recouped that easily at the time. The majority of members who signed up spent well more than $100 over the life of their AOL subscription, so while there were huge expenditures up front (and probably some creative accounting somewhere to defer the costs) to woo those members, in the end most of this resulted in a net gain.
The $100 per new member figure, of course, included the number of promotional disks mailed out to people who never signed up, didn't even own a computer, etc. The term "carpet bomb" doesn't even begin to describe how floppies were mailed at the time. For a year or more approximately 1997-1998, everyone in my apartment complex received a disk in the mail once a month. There's a 33 gallon trash can at the mailbox gazebo, and you could always tell which day of the month was "carpet bomb day." The trash can would be full of AOL disks. Incidentally, this was at the time when I was into AO-haxing, so I used to nab the lot of them for the account certificate numbers included...
Speaking of AO-haxing, for quite some time fake AOL accounts would last up to a month, assuming you didn't do anything egregious. You could make a fake account and use the hell out of it until a month was up and the billing date rolled around, at which point the billing systems would kill the account. There was a reason that the accounts lasted so long, and it wasn't that AOL didn't know the accounts were bogus. They knew full well about the number of fake accounts on the system, but what they also knew is that those accounts were active. Yes, AOL sort of "tacitly ignored" fraudulent accounts (again unless you proactively did something to get them terminated) because they could claim those accounts as among their member base.
(Side note: this changed soon after AOL went flat-rate, fake accounts would be nuked as soon as the auditing systems found them. The reason? During the 5-cent-per-minute heyday, AOL could add the number of hours spent online by hackers on fake accounts to their "hours billed this month" and thus to their supposed profits. After flat-rate took effect, fake accounts were no longer a revenue booster on the books, so they cracked down.)
Fake accounts aren't the only ones which were counted as active in perhaps a misleading manner. For years (perhaps still, I'm out of the loop) all AOL employees received two accounts. One was their internal work account, which was supposed to be closely guarded. For that reason, employees also received what was called a "1+1" account: a normal, non-privileged account that they were supposed to use if they wanted to sign on from home, or share AOL with their family. Both internal and 1+1 accounts were supposedly counted among the "active member" rolls.
It doesn't end there. Accounts created with gratis promo codes, overhead status, and invoice "billing" (most invoice accounts never incurred a bill) were also counted. These were the accounts handed out like candy to radio stations, television stations, Radio Shack stores, large corporations to encourage their employees to sign up, and various other so-called "affinity groups" on the AOL service.
I could go on. But suffice it to say, AOL's number of "subscribers" has never been accurate and likely never will.
--
This post is opinion.
I only pay $5.95 for unlimited dial-up from access4less.net. I think people are crazy to pay over $20/month for aol/msn/earthlink.
Weird. I've never had better support for anything than I've had from Speakeasy. Certainly better than what I was getting from SBC Internet for their own broadband service.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
a split doubles your number of shares, not the value of your investment.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Is "Yahoo!" the site or an exclamation in reaction to the article?
If AOL counts each screen name as a discrete "member"
Doing so could create a distorted perception of the number of paying subscribers.
I have heard statistics floated around which indicate that for several years, AOL spent more than $100 to acquire each new member... And recouped that easily at the time. The majority of members who signed up spent well more than $100 over the life of their AOL subscription, so while there were huge expenditures up front (and probably some creative accounting somewhere to defer the costs) to woo those members, in the end most of this resulted in a net gain.
The $100 per new member figure, of course, included the number of promotional disks mailed out to people who never signed up, didn't even own a computer, etc. The term "carpet bomb" doesn't even begin to describe how floppies were mailed at the time. For a year or more approximately 1997-1998, everyone in my apartment complex received a disk in the mail once a month. There's a 33 gallon trash can at the mailbox gazebo, and you could always tell which day of the month was "carpet bomb day." The trash can would be full of AOL disks. Incidentally, this was at the time when I was into AO-haxing, so I used to nab the lot of them for the account certificate numbers included...
Speaking of AO-haxing, for quite some time fake AOL accounts would last up to a month, assuming you didn't do anything egregious. You could make a fake account and use the hell out of it until a month was up and the billing date rolled around, at which point the billing systems would kill the account. There was a reason that the accounts lasted so long, and it wasn't that AOL didn't know the accounts were bogus. They knew full well about the number of fake accounts on the system, but what they also knew is that those accounts were active. Yes, AOL sort of "tacitly ignored" fraudulent accounts (again unless you proactively did something to get them terminated) because they could claim those accounts as among their member base.
(Side note: this changed soon after AOL went flat-rate, fake accounts would be nuked as soon as the auditing systems found them. The reason? During the 5-cent-per-minute heyday, AOL could add the number of hours spent online by hackers on fake accounts to their "hours billed this month" and thus to their supposed profits. After flat-rate took effect, fake accounts were no longer a revenue booster on the books, so they cracked down.)
Fake accounts aren't the only ones which were counted as active in perhaps a misleading manner. For years (perhaps still, I'm out of the loop) all AOL employees received two accounts. One was their internal work account, which was supposed to be closely guarded. For that reason, employees also received what was called a "1+1" account: a normal, non-privileged account that they were supposed to use if they wanted to sign on from home, or share AOL with their family. Both internal and 1+1 accounts were supposedly counted among the "active member" rolls.
It doesn't end there. Accounts created with gratis promo codes, overhead status, and invoice "billing" (most invoice accounts never incurred a bill) were also counted. These were the accounts handed out like candy to radio stations, television stations, Radio Shack stores, large corporations to encourage their employees to sign up, and various other so-called "affinity groups" on the AOL service.
I could go on. But suffice it to say, AOL's number of "subscribers" has never been accurate and likely never will.
I'm sure I'm unique in my experiences with Speakeasy, but they've been reliably terrible for me. I should qualify that the problems I've had have not been with any tech support (though the latest problem I dealt with stemmed from their inability to troubleshoot a technical issue), but instead with billing and payment issues, and Speakeasy's inability to keep promises. Most recently, I had a bad SDSL modem (it was bad since day one, but worked well enough that I only suffered nightly DSL outtages). The modem was purchased in November 01, I began bugging their tech support about the nightly outtages in Feb 02, and continued to do so until in Nov 02 they finally decided the modem was faulty -- conveniently right after the modem's warranty expired. Eay enough to solve, you'd think. Plenty of documentation showing I've been having problems long prior to the warranty expiration, so just replace it under warranty. That's what they said they'd do. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got my December bill -- $150 for a new modem, plus $200 for the tech visit (because apparently I'm not qualified to plug the modem into the wall jack), plus some random $80 "miscellaneous" fee, plus all of the assorted taxes on said service (including two poorly named "tax reimbursements" that were no reimbursements at all, but charges). That sure doesn't sound like a modem replaced under warranty to me! Anyway, when I finally noticed the erroneous charges in January (yay autopayments, I didn't see all of this until looking at my credit card statement), it took me about a week to actually speak with someone at a high enough level to credit back those charges. And just to add insult to injury, I had to call them, even though I was promised a call-back (typical Speakeasy -- they'll promise to call you back until they're blue in the face, but you'll never ever get that call).
Things are sorted out now, but I'm eagerly anticipating how they plan to screw me over this year. After having been screwed in 2001 and screwed in 2002, I have no reason to believe 2003 will be any different.
If it weren't that Speakeasy is the best DSL provider in the business (and that says more about their competition than it does about Speakeasy), I'd switch immediately. As it is, I put up with their bullshit so that I can have DSL how I want it. It sucks, but such is life.
A billion if I recall correctly. The only part of the comapny making some money is the more traditional one, not the ISP side of things.
What will happen to Mozilla? That is the only thing of interest to me. The rest of the jugernaut should be sold piece by piece to the best offerer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I worked for a company doing alot of AOL calling. I quit after a month. It was making me sick. All those free hours just to increase their marketing calls. I can still pop off the bullshit lines that I had to read to those poor people.
May AOL die a slow and horrible death
If he used his copy, or burned a set for his grandmother from his copy, it didn't cost his grandmother anything except the blank CD-Rs. Pocket change. He's allowed to do this under the GPL. Or if it was SUSE, he could have done an ftp install (if broadband, if it was dialup, he'd still be there). If it was most any other gnu/linux distribution, he could have downloaded it from the internet legally.
otoh, with windows, doing this is illegal, you are a dirty pirate sc*mb*g, and Jack Valenti and his cronies at the bsa will hunt you down.
Or maybe they just got tired of viruses, of spending extra for office/popup blockers/and about 4000 other applications.
Or maybe she just wanted better stability/uptime/reliability.
Or maybe she just wanted to start clustering her bingo odds calculations with OpenMosix (once again, free).
Or maybe she wants a choice of a half dozen better browsers than IE.
Or maybe she wanted free compilers
Or maybe she wanted free database servers
Or maybe she wanted the worlds most popular and free web server
Or maybe she wanted free ftp servers
Or maybe she wanted free vpn solutions
Or maybe she wanted free email servers
Or maybe she wanted free fax servers
Or maybe she wanted free raid software
Or maybe she wanted free file and print server
Or maybe she wanted free OCR software
Or maybe she wanted free multiple firewall solutions
Or maybe she wanted more than 4 free games
Or maybe she wanted free updates
Or maybe she wanted free patches that don't break the system and that work and that don't need 4 hours and two admins to apply
Or maybe she wanted access to the developers
Or maybe she wanted access to the source code
Or maybe she was tired of a company that intentionally breaks backward compatibility
Or maybe she didn't want to bother keeping track of software licenses
Or maybe she wants to donate the computer in the future and doesn't want to cause a software license problem for the recipient
Or maybe she doesn't have the additional money for a hardware upgrade required by that other once popular os.
Or maybe she needs something a bit more powerful for her genome research
Free as in freedom to modify, and in most cases free as in beer.
Look at what happened to aol last quarter. What happened there will happen to your beloved ms. And when the analysts pull their head out of the sand and stop lying, ms will implode. They are losing money on everything except the os and office. Everything except the os and office. Everything. Once product activation weeds out the "pirate" sc*mb*gs, and once gunpoint licensing finishes inflating the numbers, and people finally wake up and realize that market share is going down, not up, revenue on the os and office are going down, not up, then the world comes to an end for ms. Less than 2 years left. Hear that ticking?...
AOL, as much as they may be despised by the crowd here, is one of the only remaining "competitors" to the microsoft machine.
My favorite AOL ad used to have the AOL voice saying "goodbye" during part of the ad. I saw this long after I quit AOL, but it cracked me up. Every time AOL boots you offline for no reason it says "goodbye" in the same voice as in the ad. They removed the "goodbye" from the ad pretty quickly, but it cracked me up every time I saw it.
Still weird. They've had no problems letting me plug things in myself, and I've never had to wait for a callback--they've even called me back in response to emails I've sent them, and sometimes just to make sure everything's okay, and that my latest request has been satisfied. I've never had to deal with chargebacks, or warrany replacement issues, so I can't really speak to that... but it sounds like they just hate you, personally.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That's pretty much what I've decided. I'm pretty sure there's a permanent note attached to my account that reads, "This guy is a chump. See how bad you can screw this customer." What's worse is that I'm in the Seattle area, which is Speakeasy's home town. If anybody is going to get good service, you'd expect it to be the people from the place where Speakeasy originated. I can't even claim that they're not giving me good service because I'm not paying them much. (I'm on 768 SDSL, though I'd rather not be -- that came from their first attempt to screw me, wherein my initial 1.5/384 ADSL line at $90/mo was deemed to be $250/mo, with three months back charge, so we split the difference with Speakeasy dropping all charges for that line and me moving to $160/mo 768 SDSL. One of the more expensive consumer plans, so theoretically I should be getting stellar service, yes?)
When even the best is shit (from my own experiences), you learn to live with shit. Maybe I should start a pool for when in 2003 Speakeasy will screw me again and make some money off of my misfortunes. (Personally, my money would be on if/when I move -- I'm planning on buying a house/condo/something other than my apartment, and will want to carry my DSL with me on the move, but that's also prime territory for fuck-ups, so that's where the smart money would be if I choose to do that this year).
And I will reign as king, creating a hybrid penguin-man life form through necessary albeit not too unpleasant acts of beastiality. Thank you AOHell!
could this be the sign that the september _might_ end?
erik
...all excited, don't know why...