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AOL To Be Free For Broadband Users?
mikesd81 writes "AOL may give away more services including its AOL.com accounts reserved for paying customers. They have a proposal under consideration which calls for Time Warner's online unit to stop charging subscription fees to users who have high-speed Internet access or even dial-up service from a rival provider. Under the plan the company would continue to charge the fees for those needing dial-up access through AOL. The AOL software also would allow subscribers to continue using instant messaging, Web journals and other services without having to download separate software or figure out Web-based options. That would ease the transition and encourage them to keep using AOL services, the person familiar with the matter said."
What is the point of AOL?
My mother (in spite of my protestations) has used AOL for years.
She's stopping now though, because even though she pays a high monthly subscription, she gets bombarded with adverts from AOL, even while their addware and spyware 'zapper' is running.
There are even usually two adverts on the logoff screen.
I can't beleive it, but they've actually managed to suck more.
I dont understand why anyone would do this.
Everyone I know that's gone to broadband from AOL did it as much to escape the confines/ads/annoyances of the AOL software as for the speed. Why would you voluntarily restrict yourself to using their browser when you could be using Firefox?
Furthermore, the people that have broadband (granted, not as much today, but still) are the people that are a bit more technically savvy and want more out of their internet connection/experience. Why on earth would any of these people want AOL?
Aol may be proposing to provide free access to services to subscribers that already have internet access. That sounds like it makes alot of sense, if you want the aol service.
When I worked a short job in telephone tech support, I could never understand why someone would want aol in addition to DSL/cable/etc. I actually worked people through getting them connected to the Internet (and proved it by getting them to CNN/Yahoo/Slashdot/etc. but they didn't think they were actually connected until the aol software decided that it wanted to connect (I passed them off to aol for support since they are connected to the Internet).
I guess I just don't understand the business side of technology services. This proposed free access for highspeed subscribers should have been done years ago. Better very late (if they do it), than absolutely never, I guess.
My initial reaction was somewhere between "Who cares?" and "Why bother?" - but there's one hidden gem in this pile of broken glass. A lot of my family members won't even attempt to quit AOL because they'd have to change their email address. If they could keep it, but change their ISP (either to broadband or to a dial-up service that doesn't suck quite as hard or b0rk their computer), then that might be the thing that gets 'em to switch. They'll be happier, I'll be happier, and we can all move on and forget AOL ever existed.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
This is the sort of turnaround that everybody wishes monolithic corporations could make. Well, now AOL / Time Warner is making one. It's pretty easy to recognize that charging people for access to AOL's information services alone is not a viable business model. We constantly make fun of them for it, or at least I did. AOL for Broadband?
AOL's brand has started to really hurt lately. Ma and pa are beginning to dislike them, and so this is AOL doing the best move they can: Cut the crap, scale down the profit drive, and return to services. AOL is still a very valuable brand name, and it can still be salvaged for future use. If they immediately stop aggravating customers and do their best to play nice while Time Warner scales them down, the brand can once again have value.
We always blast away at companies for driving themselves into the ground by refusing to change. And yeah, AOL has been and still is a pretty dark beast in some spots. But despite this, AOL is doing the hardest thing a mega-corporation can do: admit their blunder, and try to change. In addition to mocking their shameful past, some positive, if exasperated, attention should be spent to note this move toward the right direction.
I have to post a disclaimer to ward off the astroturf melters, though. No, I am not an AOL employee. No, I do not own AOL stock. No, I have no personal or professional stake in AOL at all. Yes, I -am- thoroughly intoxicated.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
Talk about a brand with no respect in the market. Other companies would have rebranded or shown major changes. Seems that the longer AOL remains the longer it'll be seen as a pathetic company/product.
/Waiting for the next stories from future customers trying to cancel their account
Wait until it starts loosing more customers because of the stories they read on the media. The company will implode like a black hole, taking Time Warner with them.
Long, long ago, in a millenium far, far away, my partner and I wrote Upside Magazine's cover story "AOL Doesn't Suck". The title came because editor Richard Brandt emailed me saying "Everybody knows AOL sucks" and I wrote back "No it doesn't!"
But that was then, in the brief period when AOL shone as a dial-up ISP, when the chat rooms beat most alternatives, when alternate IM systems weren't widespread, when there were few good forums anywhere (Usenet had already been wrecked and the software for the alternatives wasn't there yet), when some of its content was competitive, and so on.
Now -- well, it's sucked for a long time now. What a waste.
That said, I've been meaning to do a piece on how net-nonneutrality would turn the whole internet into AOL. This throws a monkeywrench into that plan ...
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
Now I'm not entirely sure on this, because I never lived in a city that had a local access number for any of the "big guns". But back in the pre-internet days there were these things called "BBSes". They were computers with an (often) dedicated phone line and a modem. You could call them with your computer and leave messages, play games, and download/upload files. At first, most systems could only support one caller at a time. Most were run by hobbiests out of their homes.
Eventually, some of the systems grew to support multiple simultaneous callers, and they networked with other computers so that message forums could span the country, or even globe. One of the big guns at this time was "Compuserve". Another was "Prodigy". I believe, but am not sure, that AOL was also coming around at that time. At this stage of the game, these big players were essentially still BBS systems, they just happened to be massively multi-line, had access numbers in many major cities, and were crudely networked with other systems.
The downfall of these big fish was that they did not own the pipelines they were using to network to other systems. They only owned the modem farms.
As soon as it became relatively easy for anyone to hook up a modem to "The Internet", Compuserve, AOL, and the like lost their lock on being the only way into the online world. At that point, they had to try and "re-invent" themselves as more than a mere ISP, but, rather, as some kind of "value adder" to the online experience. They only continued to exist as long as they did because they marketed extensively and profited off of ignorant users who didn't know that once you got on the Internet you could get any content you wanted with or without the help of an AOL.
Here's a neat history of AOL etc. that Google turned up:
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall2000/McAtee/
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.