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The AOL Roller Coaster
eldavojohn writes "There's a lengthy article at Information Week about AOL's history. A lot of us are familiar with AOL's history but few of us realize that it sits at a crossroads today where it could potentially find its way back into consumer's pockets — something it's tried to do before in a hit-or-miss fashion. From the conclusion of the article, one analyst states: 'Ironically, although you'd think AOL should dump its family mentality in light of its competitors like Yahoo, the key to AOL future branding success vs. Yahoo could be to actually capitalize on its family friendliness alongside targeting the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple.' AOL has been met with many problems as of late, but can they pull themselves out of the hole this time?"
And all that Family Friendliness stops when you try to cancel your account. I'm not just talking about that one guy who recorded his calls either. When I canceled 5 years ago it took me two hours and three seperate calls.
The easiest way to cancel an AOL account, at least when they were offering an 0800 number in the UK, was just to leave it permanently connected. Via a cell phone (0800 calls were free on Orange at the time). 5500 cell phone minutes per month charged to the account got things cut off very fast.
I suppose these days one effective way would be to offer a bunch of copyrighted extreme fetish beastiality porn on the webspace and send in a DMCA takdown notice. If that's not extreme enough for them use photoshop to tatoo an AOL logo onto every sexual organ - instant account closure.
AOL recently aced PC World's list of the top 25 worst tech products of all time. .
I don't think they were all bad. They did send me all those nifty coasters, frisbees, and BB targets.