AOL Cutting 2000 Additional Jobs

butterwise writes "AOL plans to cut 2,000 jobs, or 20 percent of its worldwide workforce, as the Internet division focuses on advertising sales to make up for subscriber losses. 'The latest cuts will pare AOL's staff to 8,000, down from about 18,000 employees in 2001, when the company bought New-York based Time Warner for $124 billion. The combination led to $100 billion in losses and a more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.'"

Comments

Actually slightly surprised

[damn_registrars]

more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.

Am I the only person surprised to see this? Considering AOL used to be the top ISP in the country (IIRC), and now the cable companies are instead (like Time Warner), I would have expected that AOL-TimeWarner would have broken even on the deal. Or maybe even come out ahead, considering how much more they can charge for high speed cable modem access, with presumably an easier network to maintain than the phone network that is otherwise beyond their control.

I don't think there was any great exodus of AOL customers switching to satellite for internet service or anything...

AOL - a Web 2.0 company!

[Animats]

AOL just needs to promote itself as a "Web 2.0" company. They are, after all. Social networking? Definitely, they were there at the beginning. User-contributed content? Yes, they have that. Interactive client? Yes, AOL has that too. Mashups on the home page? Yes! Mobile phone capable? Of course. They even had virtual worlds with avatars, back in their Q-Link days.

Re:People still use AOL?

[BiggyP]

Yep, people still use AOL for the same reasons that people still use Windows, they'd terrified of change, for these poor souls their entire experience of the Internet is just what AOL and it's massively bloated software suite has presented them with. Hopefully these users will feel suitably alienated and outraged by change in upcoming versions of the AOL software that they'll consider a move to something less proprietary and start to experience the internet the same way everyone else does.

Oddly enough, even when it's quite blatantly obvious, AOL users are often hesitant to blame the AOL browser and crapware for dreadful system performance and are happy to pay through the nose for bandwidth upgrades that they never see any benefit from...

AOL should have called it a day already

[GnarlyDoug]

There is a problem with organizations. They seek to perpetuate themselves long after their purpose has been met. In AOL's case they made a metric a**-ton of money in the early days of the internet. Now, instead of distributing all that money and selling off divisions when the business model no longer was very viable and sending everybody home rich, they blew it all on trying to buy a new lease on life with Time-Warner.

This idea that once an organization or business has been created that it should try to exist for the rest of eternity is stupid. Folding before you have uselessly expended all of your capital when you no longer have a viable business model and you are not structured in a manner that allows you to change business models (very hard to do), is not only smart, but it is a fudiciary duty. Throwing all that money away on a long-shot gamble to simply continue existing is silly.

Re:Obligatory:

[cHiphead]

I used to work at AOL. I agree with every part except the last part. Time Warner related execs should've all been f'ing fired for letting AOL "buy" them with a merger of overvalued stock options in the first place. AOL had its chance to turn things completely around but the pointy hairs in charge wouldn't listen one bit to reason or common sense, the p-o-s aol 'client' was too precious to do away with due to its perceived 'value' to the marketing and advertising data mining. Ah the sweet irony of their crash and burn, just took a few years longer than expected.

Frankly, Silicon Valley can go f*ck itself as far as the rest of us geeks with (somewhat) affordable housing is concerned. ;)

I wish Google would just buy AOL out already, it'd be a real fire sale in terms of the value of the user correlated data mining.

Cheers.