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AOL To Be Purchased By T-Online?
Sique writes "The german newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports on its website, that the german ISP T-Online wants to buy AOL. The article is titled American Dream, but the actual wording is german. Ask the fish for help." There's also the article in Der Spiegel about the potential purchase as well; you can also check out T-Online's site.
T-Online got probably the most useless abuse department of all major ISPs. I wonder what they will do to AOL? Gut whatever security they got to make it profitable?
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I remember when AOL started its German division it was a joint venture (50/50) with Bertelsmann (Who also bought Napster). I wonder if they are buying the whole thing or just a portion?
Yeah, but that's ALL they did... it was a name change only, it's not like the company split.
As an employee, I wish they would - AOL consumed Time Warner because they had artificially high stock prices and decided it was time for something with real value. They've been dragging us down ever since.
Don't get me wrong - the press is really hard on AOL. Yes, customers are leaving, but they still have the most customers and charge the highest price. They are still making tons of cash, they're just making less and less of it.
While I wish the company would split, I don't see how another ISP could buy out the largest ISP in the world. Wishful thinking.
Full disclosure: I don't read German, I didn't read the article, so maybe I'm missing something.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Don't forget also that last week EMI and Time Warner were in talks to merge their music divisions
AOL/Time Warner demerger on the cards
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Consider - worlds largest post company - Deutsche Post. The airline that carries the most passengers - Lufthansa. The Germans own a good many of the biggest companies in the auto industry. And Deutsche Telecom (which I believe includes T-Online) is one of the world's largest telecomms.
I think people fail to realise how powerful the German business sector is. If Germany was the same size of the USA, I'm sure it would be the top dog at the moment, not the USA. And now that the European European Union is creating the biggest single global market, Germany should be able to increase it's economy even further as it is at the heart of Europe.
Not just an ISP. The also own T-Mobile (cell carrier - biggest in Germany I think, and growing in the US). They are tied in with Bergelsmann group (not sure on that spelling). Unlike AOL, there is real money backing up T.
T-Online has a big problem with spammer infestations and mucho compromised broadband-connected systems being (ab)used as spammer zombies. I've got large chunks of their IP space blocked locally because of these issues, mostly T-Dialin.net.
In contrast, though I may think AOL is nothing more than training wheels for the real Internet, I see maybe one or two spams a year from them, and the moron responsible quickly disappears once a report is made to AOL abuse.
Given these two obviously contrasting views, I think a buyout is going to be most interesting to watch. I wonder if Steve Case has taught himself German yet?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
what else is there?
oh, I don't know, maybe tens of millions of people paying $23.95/month for internet service, a large userbase with disposable cash to advertise to, and a nearly ubiquitous brand name?
Sure, AOL is starting to crumble and the TimeWarner merger turned out badly, but there is still a huge amount of possiblity for AOL. Given the right management and strategy.
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
I see AOL as the Apple of the space. If you wind back to the days of the original Mac Apple was making its money from being the easy to use personal computer and charging a premium for doing so. AOL is in pretty much exactly the same niche and with the same limitatations.
The Mac interface was great when the problem was persuading people they could use a computer, to overcome the fear factor. But it was much less useful and started to become a major handicap once there was a large number of technically savy users who wanted to move beyond the one button mouse. [Yes I know you can buy aftermarket add ons, try adding a button to the integrated laptop mouse area, bit of a pain if you want the machine to host an X-Windows session from a linux box app that assumes three buttons)
AOL has the same problem, they can't take the training wheels off without loosing their core market.
The other problem AOL face is that their users quickly outgrow the walled garden content AOL offers. When the Whitehouse first went online AOL sold access to the Whitehouse web site as a 'premium' service at several cents a minute extra, meanwhile the same content was available for free.
At one time it looked like there was a market for 'premium' content but that model only really works if the publishers of the content have no direct distribution channel to the consumer. Once Web sites found that they could support themselves through advertising revenue the need for AOL as a distribution channel went away. Exactly why would I pay AOL to screw up my broadband connection for me?
The problem with buying a company that has a shrinking customer base in an expanding market is that the company may well go the way of buggy-whip Inc. AOL looks to me to be in a situation very similar to that described in the innovator's dilema, in this case the disruptive factor is not so much a change in technology (although broadband could be argued as such) as a change in the user base.
Companies like AOL and Kodak can probably run profitably for quite a few more years. But if they cannot find a replacement for their core product they will go the way of Polaroid. Yes Kodak will continue to sell lots of celluloid film for ten years or more, but every person who buys a digital camera represents a shrinking of their market. The 35mm format will not die, people still buy medium and large format cameras even today. But Kodak's business depends on selling through the ammusement park kiosk.
AOL has a more severe problem, their product depends on network effects. As their customer base shrinks so does the desirability of the product.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It's the principal of having to jump though hoops to report an outage on a commercial-grade account that my company pays several hundred dollars a month for. I do feel bad for the Level 1 techs themselves (I used to be one), but not the company that hires them.
I had a similar problem with a Verizon ISDN circuit once. My router (Cisco 776) was reporting an error of "Error 3 - no Route" every time it tried to dial. The idiot that I spoke to told me "We'll send someone out to test the line, but if there aren't any problems, we are going to charge you".
They dispatched someone who did loopback tests and pronounced the line clean and functional. I told them I would try a spare router (another 776) the next day and see if it worked or not -- I wasn't discounting that it could be our equipment, even though I doubted it. No shock, the spare router had the same error message.
They then proceeded to tell me it was my configuration and they didn't support my router (they'd be too happy to support it for $75/hr). I told them this was bullshit -- said configuration had worked fine for years, and wasn't changed prior to the router not working.
This went back and fourth for the next two days (at one point they even claimed that they LOST my ticket and all the notes attached to it) before (after yelling at nearly every person I talked to -- every shread of patience I had was gone at this point) I got a co tech on the line who worked with me on solving the problem (she had me initiating ISDN calls to various numbers while she traced them). Turns out, somebody changed the reroot order in one of their tadem switches (? that means nothing to me, but I'm not a telco weenie) and that caused the calls to disappear into the ether. Why they didn't make this connection earlier is beyond me. If one of my setups stops working the first thing I do is look at anything that has been changed over the last couple of days....
By this point it had been down for 72 hours. I had three different tickets open on this issue before I finally got the knowledgeable CO Tech on the phone. She was helpful and actually knew what she was talking about. Every other idiot told me the problem was on "my end", accused me of "not knowing how to configure your own equipment", (my retort to that being "I guess Cisco's CCNP certification is overrated then"), and "We'll fix it, but it'll cost $75/hr." Three weeks after this problem was solved we received an invoice for the initial visit that did not solve or even diagnosis the problem. Needless to say, we did not pay said invoice...
It's even more amusing to me that the little Mom & Pop ISP I worked for could go three years without a major outage (the outage that did occur was due to a car hitting a telephone pole outside of our building -- beyond our control) yet major national ISPs with (for all intents and purposes) infinite resources can't manage the same feat, even for their commercial customers. The situation has stabilized somewhat now, but initially the DSL account in question would go down at least once every two weeks for half an hour or so. And that doesn't count the little 30 second "hiccups" that occurred from time to time.
I did eventually speak with the manager of the tech support and got a satisfactory answer out of him -- too few techs employed for the number of calls, company refusing to give out another contact number for non-tech support problems, stressed out customers blaming his people, etc etc. We had quite the mutual rant session for awhile.
Bottom line: I understand outages occur and they are beyond the control of the avg guy at tech support. Just don't read to me from your sheet about router lights and operating systems when you have a known outage on your screen and an estimated time of repair for said outage. If you do, I'm going to rip you a new one, and rip your supervisor a
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.