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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?"
...die in a fire. A nasty, painful fire.
The article kind of glosses over that time that AOL released its users onto the Internet at large with absolutely no barriers or training, even an indication they were really not on AOL.
One of my funniest memories of that time was when someone had a webpage up criticizing AOL, and an AOL admin/cop/whatever contacted him and seriously explained that the webmaster was violating AOL's terms of service, and to take the webpage down immediately or have his AOL account terminated.
People looking for examples of how a corporate entity will gang-bang a shared service at the first opportunity need look no further than AOL and its toxic bus-load drop-offs onto the net.
Next time, mention that in a "History".
What the hell is AOL?
No really...
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AOL VS The Internet:
http://www.airsho.com/PCwebster/aol_users.htm
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
That's funny. "...at the forefront of the Internet revolution".
AOL was the last of the big BBS' to move to the internet, dragged kicking and screaming into ISP-dom by the flight of its subscribers to services that provided internet mail, usenet, ftp and uucp.
About ten thousand of Jack Rickard's army of sysops were offering internet services before AOL's tentative entry. Hardly "a company that was once ahead of its time", AOL nearly didn't make it at all.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I don't know if family friendly is a word I would use with AOL. Every browsed their own chat rooms? You see a lot of user created room names like M4M in various forms. Also, AOL is more a content provider now than just an ISP. Your average ISP is not AOL/Time Warner. They give away their music videos (music.aol.com). I wonder how they will make money with their free service. Lastly, all you needed to do to use the internet without AOL in the days of dial-up was login to AOL, and then minimize it.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
We started off using AOL when they had all the free trials gear for dialup. When we'd get through a free trial, we'd just use another credit card. Now, Dad pays for Unlimited Dialup (broadband not available at his house) with them. He knows there's cheaper, and in almost every other aspect he shops around. But they Woo'd him in the beginning, probably with the email account for everyone in the family and the "kid-safe" chatrooms. I don't know any other ISPs (atleast in Australia) that run their own (easy to access for the not-so-technically inclined fold) chatrooms, and I think it's a good idea - people are basically forced to behave by the fact their username is tied to a service they're paying for. I still think AOL are good in this respect. Other than that, yes, AOL should "Die in a fire", as the OP states.
Most of the people who I know who use Macs were recommended them (and recommend them to others) because they want things to be easy and simple.
This *could* be an ideal market for AOL, I agree, but it's hardly tech savvy.
FWIW generally my experience is that the market is split into approximately four parts -
Those that want an easy life (running Macs)
Those that want complete control (running Linux)
Those that don't know what the options are (running Windows)
Those that have specific software needs (running any of the above).
The number of people in category one who could be described as tech savvy is not really all that high. You don't need to know a lot about the insides of a computer to decide that this one doesn't need much work to make it do what you want.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
To the non tech savvy, tech savvy now means "buys gadgets."
The actual tech savvy, of course, are the people who pick the broken and discarded gadgets from the "tech savvy"'s trash and make new and interesting gadgets from their bits and pieces.
God I love early adopters.
KFG
Have things really descended to the point that someone can seriously utter a phrase like, "the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple"? Apple's entire schtick, from the first Macintosh onwards, has been that their products don't require any kind of expertise, that they "just work", and that they produce the computer "for the rest of us" -- where "us" should probably not be construed to mean frequent Slashdot readers and users of Sourceforge.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
And it would be good if they went back to having cleaned up chat rooms, even though I suspect that that boat sailed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
And now AOL wants to reach out to the "tech-savvy" segment? Do they not understand that the tech-savvy have spent the last 10 years laughing derisively at the AOL brand name? They would be much better off developing a new brand name for that purpose.
That won't work well, as most tech-savvy people are smart enough to see through the guise.
Video Production Support
Having PCWorld rate the top 25 worst tech products is a lot like Sadaam Husein rating the worst leaders and not even including himself.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, an excellent way for them to make a comeback is if they did a complete overhaul and focused on providing a heavily filtered version of the Internet in all forms, in an attempt to make it as safe from crime, viruses, and nasty content as possible. With the total and complete mess that the Net is in these days (flooded with spam, crime, and malware), I would think that at this point in time, some people would be falling all over themselves to use a service like that. I would even use a service like that for my business!
Mac: For people who don't want to know why their computer works
Linux: For people who do want to know why their computers works
DOS: For people who want to know why their computer doesn't work
Windows: For people who don't want to know why their computer doesn't work
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
When you graduate from college any move out of the dorms you may find that your time actually has some value, at which point you may see why OS X is the better choice for desktop *nix. But until then, enjoy your delusions.
Let's face it, it is a safe bet that no one reading /. is going to sign up for AOL or give that company any money at all.
Also, it is possible for the company to turn a large profit without that market (IMHO, IANABA*)
The major problem they face is a image problem, a lot of people who might like a service like AOL have already herd that "AOL Sucks, never use their service". Without debating the validity of that statement, I think most of these people could be fooled by a corporate name change. The people that will see through it probably won't use AOL in any form no mater what, so it doesn't matter, as far as AOL is concerned.
Along with a name change, the new company would need something to make it different from the 5million other ISPs out there. As some have suggested, I think providing a "Safe internet" would be a good one. No content provider is going to win customers by having "special content no one else has". However, the fact is there is a lot on the internet that average people would prefer to avoid. If the new AOL could convince people that it provided a useful and interesting, pre sorted and approved subset of the great big internet; while at the same time allowing people to venture outside the "Safe zone" if they are feeling adventurous, they could carve out a market. Particularly of families where parents don't care to monitor their children and decide what is "appropriate" for them; they could (and I think would rather) someone like their ISP do it for them.
This, as I see it, is what it will take to "turn AOL around".
*IANABA == I am not a business analyst
Hi, I would like to cancel my subscription to this thread. No really. Please. I really don't want this subscription, please let me cancel. No you can't talk to my Dad. Please just unsubscribe me. Oh, 6 free months of this thread? I'll pay you to unsubscribe me. Therein lies AOL's yellow brick road to profit, make people pay to unsubscribe lol.
AOL and Compuserve (remember them?) were great in the pre-CD era. I never bought floppy disks. Whenever I was low, I'd call up their free numbers and tell them I was interested in a free trial. They'd send me the disks, which I would promptly wipe and re-use. CDs took all the fun away.
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