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AOL Subscribers Finding Greener Pastures
Mitch writes "The Register is reporting that America Online has lost close to 2 million customers since September 2003. At the end of September they had 22.7 million customers in the US which was down more than 500,000 since the beginning of the quarter. This news comes one day after it was announced that more than 700 jobs would be cut from Virginia offices by the end of this year."
That the September finally ended?
Why do the remaining 20 million stay? There is nothing on AOL that can't be accessed from the internet at half the cost.
12:50 - press return.
Maybe people are starting to realize that AOL sucks big time....
sending out those free coasters, they'd save some money and not have to fire staff.
Maybe they should stop focusing on "Making the internet better" and make it less cumbersome for their users. Each version is so much worse than the last. And why are they still using IE at the core when they own the development of the world's best browser???
Sound waves should be free!
What?!
Is the collective internet IQ average actually rising? People are realizing that paying $27 for a dialup account is a rip off?!
who r u gon make fun of on teh intarwebs nemore?? omgwtfbbq!!!11one
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
People would rather pay $50 and have broadband than close to $30 and have dial up. While you can use AOL over broadband, what's the point?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
You seen those AOL commercials that began to show up a few weeks ago (during the baseball playoffs and world series)?
I never understood why AOL thought it would be a good idea to show a roaring mob of millions of customers outside company headquarters with ideas for "how to improve the Internet." I guess these ads show a pretty accurate picture of their recent status, with that many customers leaving...
Middle management's first and only answer to each new day in business: fire hundreds of people, preferably by entire departments.
Of course, AOL is still making over $400 million a month in subscriber revenue, but it's always better to have mass layoffs, as every middle manager knows. Fire 'em all. Layoffs by the hundreds. Destroyed careers. Destroyed credit. Savings lost. Years of effort flushed down a shitpipe. Who the fuck cares? The business must maintain their earnings and 20% annual growth.
Disney fired 4000 people between nine-figure summer movie releases, then destroyed an entire animation studio, firing 250 with unique abilities and experience. Walt Disney was very proud of the fact most of his employees had worked for Disney their entire careers. Now, the company can't wait to fire people every quarter. It's the way of business.
This isn't capitalism. It's budgeting by layoffs.
Careers are meaningless. Everyone is a temp. W-4 employment is a farce.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Here are some news: it seems that AOL is going to cut some jobs in europe (France) too.5 ,39181152,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/business/0,3902071
le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant (M.Proust)
Netzero has been doing some very effective advertising for about a year. AOL did nothing, no changes in service, no advertising, no competitive rates, etc.
Now, AOL just started advertising, claiming value added services.
They're still going nowhere, at the end of the day the average consumer cares nothing about services, they want a cheaper price.
AOLs only alternative that I can see is to purchase netzero, but don't migrate their userbase. Continue to be netzero, and if you loose customers from AOL, BFD. You'll be getting less profit per customer, but at least you'll still the the recurring revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see AOL crash and burn, but they _do_ have a niche.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Does anyone think they could simplify thier system, yet still offer some useful services and stay afloat?
Simplicity and stability is why we stay with our ISPs isn't it? (Except for those of us w/ viable no alternative provider.)
Of course they probably share the same laws of complexity that government and Microsoft share.
For many AOL users AOL _is_ the internet. As more become educated they relealize they have been duped by clever marketing. When friends demonstrate broadband technolgies which, remarkably, access the "AOL" internet with freedom and speed they wake up.
People are being forced to learn how to operate their computer because of all these viruses challenging their intellect. Thus they don't need their AOL training wheels anymore.
The stupid ones are quitting AOL as well, because they stopped using their computers because it's too much work for them.
Finally we may be able to get those dam AOL disks out of the Post Office!!!
When I had Steve case (http://case.cs.mnsu.edu/) back in college I thought he was a great prof. I don't understand where AOL went wrong?
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
They're all moving over to their local cable and telephone companies. Which have even lower security than AOL. Expect more worms, viruses, and general whackiness than when AOL was between them and the Wild Wild Net
Best Slashdot Co
Compared to past years, my MTA logs for my company have shown a HUGE decline in inbound chain letters, and nested FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of ...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Many AOL "customers" aren't actually customers at all, but rather, people who think AOL=Internet, MS-Word and Windows are the same thing, and that their monitor is 'the computer' while the computer case is 'the hard drive'. AOL isn't losing actual customers, they're losing people who washed up there because they clicked on something when they booted their BestBuy PC for the first time. These people are simply moving to Broadband, or any one of the $6/month ISPs, or DSL, or something else.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
(a) Net newbies who then keep renewing their service
(b) Older folks who like a bit of hand-holding
This is not meant to be derogatory --- I'm simply curious as to who these millions are and why they stick with a service that is slow, cumbersome and expensive.
In this windows world of hand holding
and everything decided for you
Pre-chewed food
Which God
What mate
What clothes
What president
I can handle it all except someone pre-reading my
every email and scolding me for content...
maybe others are "getting it" also...
Jeeez what country are we in again ?
I wonder if Time-Warner is starting to regret it.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Dialup is horribly slow, the cable and telcos are rolling out broadband aggressively, and AOL doesn't offer anything sufficiently compelling to make people stay with the service. Their implementation of DSL is especially bad.
My wife was one of the cancellations. I feel so special now. (If you must know, she got AOL because she was in another state for 3 months and needed some form of Internet.)
Or maybe they asked for ways to make the Internet better, and their customers went out and found them: Netzero and broadband. AOL For Broadband is not taking off, and never will, since the Internet itself provides all the content most people will ever want. Tamed by Google, there is no need for a general-purpose portal like AOL.
Aside from being the default home page for a legacy user base, few have any reason to use the service.
In short: as most geeks know, AOL is redundant.
sigs, as if you care.
Let's see, at a loss of 2 Million / 2 months, or rather Million / month, we will hopefully see AOL go down in flames in less than two years.
WOO HOO! TWO YEARS TO GO!
AOL is a lot like training wheels for many.. Its a starting point , a 'safety net'.. but then they grow up..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is there anything more to say?
Laws are for people with no friends.
A huge majority of broadband users stay w/ AOL because:
1. They do not want to change their email address.
2. They do not know how to configure their email client to point at their ISP.
3. They belong to special interest groups on AOL. 4. They have years of familiarity w/ AOL and fear change.
I work with these people every day. Sigh.
http://www.techyrants.com
I have a friend who worked for AOL at the Dulles VA facility. That's the facility
built by AOL's short-lived stock money when they were bought by Time-Warner.
She left years ago and eventually left due to the monotonous, oppressive working
environment.
Now she is with a Civil Engineening firm (her original skill) and enjoying her life again.
She never liked writing TPS reports.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
If AOL offered VOIP people could save on their phone bills and maybe not even need a dialup line at all. Then to get onto AOL...wait...that won't work... :-)
Charlie's Magic
AOL has launched getnetscape.com advertising 9.95 internet access with virus/spam protection, etc.. They're advertising it as just "Netscape" and keeping the name AOL out of it as much as they can. They ran TV ads for it during the election coverage Tusaday night. The ads and the website both try to play on the Netscape name's very grassroots feel. They're kinda playing an Earthlink-like image in all of it. Don't believe it, it's just AOL in disguise.
11*43+456^2
My 80 year old dad, who is not technology adept, was paying $22 per month for AOL dial up. I switched him to Juno, he saves money and the service is fine.
I wonder why AOL is still alive.
From the city of liberalism in the suburbs of Chicago
BJ, Oak Park, IL
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Sir can you go ahead and open up Internet Explorer for me?
Umm.... I don't think I have MSN but I have AOL
Fastduke
My cousin tried to switch off AOL. His Kids raised Holy hell because of the IM and email accounts. ALthough I'm pretty sure you can use AOLIM without AOL...
Anyway he tells me if you "bring your own access" AOL is 1/2 the price.
In the immortal words of Nelson:
(points finger at aol) HA HA
Please let them fire the person who keeps sending me those $%*# disks.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Someone at Aol should read up on some of Clayton Christiansen's (sp?) books regarding disruptive technologies. It appears they've said good riddance to their lower profit customers, all the while ignoring the power users:
- Those who want control of their internet. Those that don't want to be blocked (by feature and by port) from using third-party mail programs such as Outlook.
- Those low-profit customers who want broadband. Yes we know 56K yields a much higher profit margin, but by doing that, they've missed the damn boat! It's an eventuality that everyone will want to use broadband. Who wants to be stuck with an overpriced 56k connection?
- The internet and everything it stands for screams "OPEN". There was a time when Aol was perfect. It provided information and things to do when the internet was barren. No longer. Even MSN has embraced the open internet by porting many of their features to public websites. Yet Aol is still keeping everything closed for members only.
- Bad strategy. The whole point of Aol doing all of the above is to inflict pain on those who want to leave. In business, pain always work better than vitamins. I know because back in '96 I had an Aol dialup account. It was a bitch to dump it and lose my email address, AIM account, community forums, chat rooms, etc. However, I needed to use Outlook. I saw all those things that were exclusive to Aol becoming widely available for free on the internet. At almost $24/month, it became unbearable after a while, and I dumped it. Never looking back again.
I have to say, Aol is the one company that, when someone leaves, they will almost never re-join. That tells you something is seriously wrong with their business plan.
eTrade SUCKS
Disney is lost, the only movies that are realy good from "them" are actualy from pixar. After "the incredibles" pixar is not legaly bound to disney (they had a contract of 5 movies, that turned into 6 since disney insisted that toy story 2 was a sequel and did not count as a movie).
They now are thinking that 3D is the reason pixar is a success, forgeting that those movies are good for their characters, scripts and animation skills. If disney keep doing movies like the last ones they produced, they will sink even deeper.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The day AOL goes bankrupt is the day I dance in the streets! All that pain and suffering they put me through back in '93-'94 when I first started using the net. Though I must say the eventual rise of the IM hacking tools was rather amusing for a bit there :) I tried the Q-Tip tool on a friend of mine but didn't see anything obvious happening to him so I logged off. Then about 15 minutes later he calls to tell me I locked up his computer for that whole time, he couldn't even three key salute the thing :)
Well, here's what I've noticed. AOL has recently launched another campaign saying that for $30 they'll give you free Anti-Virus software but they just don't get it. The problem lies with the cost of their service not their software BUT all software companies do the same thing when they lose market share - load more bloat and try to charge for it. PEOPLE DON'T WANT MORE BLOAT THEY WANT CHEAP PRICES. Nobody is going to spend $30 for dialup when that is the same price for broadband in this area AND it frees up the phone line. It's just crazy. I've noticed this happen with almost all software makers when they become big. Roxio used to have a decent package and nero too. They were slim packages that did just about everything that I could do. 2 yrs ago Roxio and Nero had functionalities that can now only be found in their retail package. So what do we do, we go and use the free stuff CDXPPro or Linux K3B that is full featured for basic needs. MSFT did it too and AOL is doing it. I've noticed this trend but don't understand WHY they do it this way. Just drop the price to $15 -$20 and people will stay. Look at the cost of Netzero now. Dial-up is cheap which is right where it should be for the quality/speed that you get through dialup.
I have recently been seeing commercials for Netscape as an ISP, offering similar rates to netzero with the $5 more for web accelerator option.
I assumed that this was AOLs way of getting in on the budget ISP market. Is there any indication of how many of the members they loose are being picked back up under netscape?
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
The first circle was Compuserve. There were a lot of fairly clueful people on Compuserve who just hadn't discovered flat-rate PPP hosting.
The second circle was AOL. Compuserve users tended to view AOL as a cartoon environment and AOL users as idiots. The more clueful AOL users occasionally moved to Compuserve but only rarely from AOL to PPP dialup hosting.
The bottom circle of Network Hell, from which there was no redemption, was Prodigy. Prodigy was like the short bus for AOL. If you couldn't handle AOL's cartoony complexity, you could go to Prodigy and quietly play with play-doh with the other Prodigy users. They say Prodigy went out of business, but I believe the service and their users were quietly ejected into another dimesion, where they remain TO THIS VERY DAY! No one's going to organize a search party though.
These days AOL's mostly just another Internet provider, though it sounds like they also still have some internal services they offer. CompuServe's still around but I believe they have all of about 3 subscribers left. And of course Prodigy's off in the dimension of cluelessness. It's really not to surprising that some AOL users are trying to escape, and I guess the new marketing campaign is an attempt to scare up some more newbies. AOL provides the Internet an invaluable service (Keeping most AOLers out of our hair over here on the seedy west side of the net) so I hope they manage to stay successful.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
AOL arrogantly ignored broadband for years. I don't know if they thought it was going away, or that it would never see enough market penetration to affect their business, but this was a fatal misstep. At the time broadband was taking off, most of the baby Bells would have sold their souls to co-brand their DSL service with AOL, but I'm guessing AOL thought they could keep it to themselves and make more money. Now, even more arrogantly, they seem to believe that once someone HAS broadband, they'll pay full AOL prices just to access AOL content over their broadband connection. They're getting pinched on both sides - cheap dialup providers like NetZero and peoplePC are killing them on price, and DSL and cable kill them on performance. And they're too ignorant to realize that very little of their content can't be had in more variety, cheaper, on the internet at large than in their happy little walled garden.
How so many people make so much money to make such stupid decisions is beyond me.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/07/17/stor ies/2003071703730500.htm
aol has been hiring in india, if you would equate the jobs cut here and add up the jobs added in their manila and bangalore sites .... adds up.
so this is more of outsourcing and less of downsizing.
ohh of course the profit always goes up, if not u can always fire the grunts in india.
nuff said.
1001100 1100101 1100001 1110110 1100101 1001101 1111001 1000010 1101001 1110100 1110011 1000001 1101100 1101111 110111
If I knew someone as arrogant as you, I'd just pay you off with a few bucks.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Good luck with that.
Just a week ago I got a new promotion from AOL that includes 2 AOL CDs.
So, like, that must be even better...
Uhh...wait...that doesn't work...no..never mind.
*USans
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
They're probably losing customers on purpose. After all, now when all of their members show up to give them ideas they'll have enough chairs. Not to mention they're probably as sick as I am of hearing stupid members standing up on tables saying "I want, I want, I want, I want...".
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
I have a dozen friends, mostly non-technical, who use AOL for the chatrooms, and that's it. And it's worth $25 a month to them for that.
AOL and Future Shop (and possibly Best Buy) have a deal going on right now where you sign up for AOLMax (AOL's "broadband enhancement" package or some such nonsense) and you get a 20$CDN gift card for use in the store. The fine print on the little pamphlet said the first month was free and you could cancel at any time, there didn't seem to be any lock-in or "catch". So what the heck, may as well go for it and see what the scam is. I signed up - a 10 minute process - and immediately got my 20$ gift card.
Two weeks later I still hadn't received an e-mail with my username/password to sign in, nor did I get my CD Package through the snail mail. Because I didn't really care about their service I decided to call and attempt to cancel my subscription. After dialing their 1-800 number and being on hold for 20 minutes I was able to speak to an _incredibly_ friendly lady named Wendy. She wanted to know how she could "make my online experience better" (Direct quote). I politely told her she could do that easily by canceling my account. After a few generic questions (Were you unhappy with the service? No. Why are you leaving? It didn't interest me.) she gave me a cancel confirmation number and I was done.
I will be watching my credit card bill next month to ensure I'm not charged for anything, just in case. To say I expected canceling to be harder is an understatement. I can't imagine how much money AOL is losing on this marketing strategy, but if they want to give me 20$ for 30 minutes of my time I'm certainly not going to shove them away.
Actually only a few customers actually wanted to leave. The others were required by their terms of service to say "Me too!!! LOL"
On topic: Having an AOL account means that you don't know anyone who understands computers. As the number of people who know a little expands, AOL will eventually dry up and disappear. I think it's obvious Steve Case knew that, and that's why he wanted Time Warner's involvement, and engineered the "merger" at the top of the bubble.
Responding to your sig: They think the violent, chronic liar is Christian! But he's an alcoholic. Alcoholics often have both a very engaging side and a violent side. Usually they try to hide the violent side. Most people can't tell he's lying!
There's a similarity between being a supporter of George W. Bush and being an AOL account holder. Both show ignorance, only that. AOL is not, in fact, giving its subscribers anything they should want, and Bush is not, in fact, giving the "Christians" anything they should want. And, anyone who is so easily led to violence is definitely not a Christian.
As the U.S. has grown, the intelligent, ambitious people have left the rural areas and gone to places that offer more opportunity. That's why the blue states are in the areas of opportunity and the red states are in the middle. Probably AOL users have a similar demographic.
Does anybody know if this is still happening?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If AOL is smart, they'll figure out a way to package their Disneyland of services along with DSL or Cable hookups. While many here on /. make fun of AOL users, the fact of the matter is that the service really is very easy to use for most people. Most ordinary people would be hopelessly lost on the internet without something like AOL. Not only that, AOL can be very useful to the rest of us by minimizing the likelihood of viruses or worms spreading via their customers. So what am I saying? I'm saying that we really need AOL to get their act together to keep their current customer base from running rampant on the net!
I've seen ads for AOL high speed which I think can work with an existing broadband installation. But they need to go farther than that and offer the complete, one big box, solution. Otherwise they will continue to lose customers as broadband enters more homes. I think Time-Warner has the assets to make this all happen, they just need to muster the will power and a plan. AOL made its money by being easy for Joe User to install and use. They need to do the same in the broadband age.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Just tell them, "Put me on your do-not-call list".
--
They think he's Christian!
Just wanted to say, I'm getting my broadband for 29.95 a month.
It's probably too late for him, but if you are having to provide an email address for people it might not be a bad idea to use an email redirection service like Pobox.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Adelphia offers a free anti-virus subscription service, firewall and privacy protection bundle to all subscribers, free spyware removal and parental controls to it's premium home service customers. Adelphia Freedom Internet Security Services
The software can be installled on multiple PCs, updates are automated and free.
Amazing (in a way), isn't it? Remember when all the silly little DotComs were sending 93% of their "mez" rounds to AOL just so they could get placement on the AOL page that was accessible through ? Feel free to speculate on where all that money went. :)
Actually, Pixar is distributing one more movie through Disney. It will be called "Cars."
What we have here is 2 million internet newbies who recently got a clue! (That they do *not* need to dialup AOL first in order to get on the internet...)
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
AOL and similar services (Compuserve) were built around a model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. In the early 90's, they were the cutting edge; they made it easy for the ordinary person to get online, plain and simple. How could this not be popular? And it was.
Broadband and other providers are now beginning to eat at AOL's US marketshare (lack of new subscribers figures prominently), and for some reason, people (perhaps including the Time-Warner/AOL people) are surprised.
Where is AOL strong? The USA and the UK. Both have similar (in a broad sense) market realities; in the US it's the slow rollout of broadband due to structural reasons while in the UK it's the network's structure itself (expensive phone charges, often including tolls for local calls, and monopoly providers of broadband, who coincidentally have a financial interest in keeping you on dialup).
Now, Compuserve and AOL were big competitors in Canada at the beginning; then AOL bought Compuserve and quit offering it to new customers, although technically it still exists, sort of. Roll the clock back to 1995.
For a mature product category, it's a standard marketing given that a firm can expect to get business in Canada roughly equal to 10% of it's US business. At first, it looked like that with AOL/Compuserve in the US and Canada.
Then came broadband, and lots of competition. Storefront providers began showing up in my town around then, to the point where I could get access from dozens of dialup ISPs, some of which had as little as a few hundred customers. The local University offered it's network access at home for 10 bucks a month to employees and students.
As well, Cable and telephone companies began to get in (they lagged the mom-and-pop providers, getting serious towards the end of the decade). The local teleco had already rebuilt province-wide with fibre optic cable, completing it's network in the early 80's.
I had AOL for about 3 months in 1995 (you know, free with the computer). Then, I switched to broadband (CableModem) when it was introduced in my city. February 1996. A few months later DSL was offered (my local teleco was the first full-scale launch in N America, if you lived in the 2 largest cities 80% of the residential area had it available at launch). See "structural reasons", above.
Now, I don't live in some techno-heaven; I live in a city of less than 200K in a rural area; draw a circle 100 miles in radius around city hall and you get 260K, not 500. But, no regularory/right-of-way issues. Rollout is quick. Today (2004), if you live within 10 miles of a town of 800 people or more, anywhere in the province, you can get DSL.
Virtually all Canadian internet users came on after the introduction of broadband, not before. These customers don't know anything about AOL, and signed up with the broadband provider itself.
So, around 1998, after being firstest on the block, AOL was around number 8 in Canada (subscriber numbers). By 2000 they don't even register in the top 20. AOL/Compuserve never got past 1 million subscribers and have some fraction of that now.
We know AOL is quite familiar with this history; a lot of it is their history. So, here are the questions they should have asked themselves:
Why didn't we get our 10%? We should have had around 3 million in Canada. Never even got to 1/3 of that.
What can we do to combat broadband? Content? Pricing? Added Value? What? What is it our competition offers that's so attractive and how can we offer something that competes?
Since we had this little micro-model showing us the future, what did we do to use this info to combat market forces in the US, where we still have a leg to stand on?
What do you mean, "we did nothing"?
Personally, I think I would have switched to some variation of the @home model and made my service integral with a broadband provider. AOL would still be getting checks and new subscribers. Now that @home has failed and providers know how easy it is to do it themselves, even this model is now doomed.
1) Apparently if you're not a "PowerLink" customer you're not permitted to browse information about PL products and services.
c fm#hardwaresoftware, they only provide a cable modem and won't provide any additional hardware if you intend to install it yourself.
9 3061.) I know from experience that Comcast's approach is to connect your PC to the cable modem, toss a CD at you, and walk out the door.
2) What kind of firewall are we talking about? Is it a self-contained router like a Linksys or Netgear? Built into the cable modem? Or is it some piece of software that's installed on Windows which the user can turn off at will? According to http://www.adelphia.com/high_speed_internet/faqs.
I would love to see some evidence that major consumer ISPs are doing something to provide additional security to their subscribers. (See my prior comments about this at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118246&cid=99
Even more problematic are these comments in that same thread from Slashdotter michael_cain:
"When I worked for a large cable company, those of us in the technology organization wanted to make it policy to recommend to subscribers that they have a firewall. The legal department [argued] that we exposed ourselves to liability lawsuits if we said, in effect, that the Internet was a dangerous place and you should take steps to protect yourselves. So the company did not give users warnings, and the network became one of the world's larger sources of various attacks..."
Apparently from your comments Adelphia doesn't believe that telling its subscribers that the Internet is a dangerous place will open up a possible source of liability. If true, that's a breath of fresh air.
I, for one, welcome our new AOL over...
WAIT A MINUTE! Did you say people LEFT AOL! WOOHOO!!! There is a shred of hope left for civilized humanity!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
if i was a rich company like AOL, i would merge with Comcast or Mediacomm
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
Actually, they have one more with Disney. "Cars", due out in 2005.
My mom and sister use AOL. They have broadband already and pay the 30$/month AOL premium on top of their connection cost. I can recognize the value of community that appeals to the general public. AOL in general is a pretty friendly place, as is typically the case with mental wards and low security prisons, from my experiences. What can AOL do to improve?
From what I can tell, AOL is too intrusive in it's "features", too bloated, too expensive for the value it adds. Remove the OS/Browser skins and the agents. Stop the atrocious branding that seems to be mandatory on every visual. If ANYONE bothered to do a study on how many ppl actually bother to look at the AOL Today page, I'm pretty sure it's close to 10% or less. AOL seems to be hell-bent on pushing you information that you don't want and hiding the mechanisms to staunch the flow. From a professional standpoint, there just isn't anything on AOL that I can't access more reliably (meaning: unfiltered and minimal delay) directly from a ftp/website/group. That's just my opinion.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
L4M3 Lusers...
My guess is they don't want to have us become just another stat.
On the brighter side, AOL offers free, permanent services. Simply call them up after registering Without a credit card, and cancel. They'll offer you three months free to test out the service and make up your mind once more. Before this time is up, call back and cancel again. Voila. Three more months free. A close friend of mine did this for just over a year after his broadband was cut off.
AOL and similar services (Compuserve) were built around a model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. In the early 90's, they were the cutting edge; they made it easy for the ordinary person to get online, plain and simple.
No, both Compuserve and AOL predate the commercial Internet by as much as a decade. What they really offered initially was a well-structured BBS service, especially Compuserve. CS offered a number of hardware and software support forums, many of which were managed by the manufacturers of the products being offered. For instance, if I had a question about WordPerfect 5.1 in 1990, I dialed up my CS account and asked it on the WP forum. There was no other reliable source of do-it-yourself support.
AOL viewed that CS was too "techy" for ordinary folks and designed a service that was much simpler to use, with content like recipes and the like targeted at consumers. CS was largely a text-based service, while from the start AOL built a graphical client that worked with MS Windows and Macs.
When the commercial Internet arrived ca. 1993-94, both companies scrambled to interconnect their subscribers with the Internet, in particular, with Internet email. AOL's largely less-technical customer base stayed with them through the expansion of the Internet, while CS's subscribers were often clueful enough to migrate directly to PPP dialup and direct IP.
My dad gets AOL for $3.95 a month; apparently his employer decided to sponsor employee access to the Internet to save on the cost of distributing paper copies of stuff like the benefit-plan description. It's not clear whether the employer pays anything to AOL.
It's that they stopped sending out all those free CDs. Or at least I stopped getting them. One of the last ones came in a nifty little wooden box. Gosh, we'll never see days like those again.
He runs a social organization that, alas, has had an AOL address for years & years. They've literally a gig of email archived in AOL "Filing Cabinet" files, and no way to extract 'em. He's sticking with AOL8 and praying someone catches up and reverse-engineers their file format, but until he can get that stuff extracted he's locked in.
I've looked over the years for something that can export from an AOL "Filing Cabinet" file to some more standard format and found nothing. There are a few dead projects from back in AOL6 days that even then were buggy, but they don't work with later versions. When we've tried a few shareware apps none were successful and their authors of the if-it-works-good/if-not-sorry view.
We've tried the importing into the newer AOL email clients (and then hopefully exporting) but they're not backwards compatible with these files. We've also considered forwarding all of the email to the AOL servers and then pulling it out but manually sending it all that'd be the work of months and with AOL servers some significant percentage of the emails would simply 'disappear'.
So, if you've got a way of pulling out the contents of one of these grumble-grumble files, along with the attachments and addressing information, please speak up. If anyone would care to put up an AOL-emigration page that would be even better, help lots of trapped folks break their proprietary file format shackles.
Thanks in advance for any help folks can provide.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Yes you're right, I didn't knew about this one. :-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
aol has always been impressive in how long it's taken to die... many people (including me) thought it wouldn't survive the 90's... taking over twx was the most amazing con job i've seen in a long time... now that twx is in charge of the relationship aol can skrink, reinvent itself, and continue on the path to a much smaller and less profitable company...
Get your torrents...
Moderation:
50% Insightful
30% Troll
20% Offtopic
One thing I've learned about U.S. voters. Many of them have very little idea of the activities of their government. Research shows that's true: Bush Supporters Misread Many of His Foreign Policy Positions.
There is a class of voters, and a class of Slashdot members, who know little but are sure they are right. My comment above is definitely not a Troll or Offtopic. There should be a Disagree moderation.
I can't argue with anything you've said; it's all pretty much the way things were.
... model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. ..."
... new, emerging technology, for example: dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. ...
I do think you misread me, however. "
Let's rewrite it, replacing the latin for what it means in english:
"For example" is not exclusive; it's just one example. ARPANET and BBS's are as much a part of the internet's history as online services like AOL; I don't draw a line between what went before and what we have now. WANs in one way or another.
In any case, thanks for your comments (expanding on the early user experience in particular).
Regards.
Since many Slashdotters were still in elementary school when the commercialization of the Internet took place, I often find there's a lack of historical perspective here. So perhaps my comments came across as a bit harsh.
However, I don't see AOL as part of "the internet's history" at all. AOL was a glorified BBS that had to accomodate itself to the Internet or lose. The ARPANET, in contrast, was the Internet for much of its history.