Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Boss to Employees: "Goodbye".
There, now it's out of the way.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
But, I don't feel sorry for AOL.
So easy to hate them for their horrible business practices.
May they disappear into dust.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
They do not know any better, it is as simple as that really. They either do now know other options exist, think the service is the same, or for many they are to lazy to break their ties with AOL thinking they will lose their email, aim, and other things AOL gives them.
I have asked numerous people why they still have AOL over the years and almost all of them said that they have had it for so long that they are uncomfortable changing for whatever reason. AOL does a great job locking its customers into its systems and making it seem counter-intuitive to switch.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I blame this on all of you Slashdotters. For years you just HAD to casually point out how crummy their service is, and how morally repugnant their business practices are, and now look at what has happened!
Have you no morals? Will you not rest, until every poor person working for an underwhelming ISP has lost their job?
For shame, Slashdot!
- Scott
AOL didn't buy Time Warner, they merged in what was widely consider one of the blunders of the "dot com era". A blunder for TW that is. It is also considered one the smartest things AOL CEO Steve Case ever did. Many people believe that he pulled the wool of Time Warner's eyes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner
The death of dial up did not have to be the death of AOL. TW had all sorts of content it could have sold as a subscription to it's user base before they lost it all. Now they are scrambling and suing their fans to keep their media empire alive. More savvy competitors are cutting into their sales via the internet with no base at all. They expect the treats to draw customers.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
AOL Keyword: Inevitable
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.
I have asked numerous people why they still have AOL over the years and almost all of them said that they have had it for so long that they are uncomfortable changing for whatever reason. AOL does a great job locking its customers into its systems and making it seem counter-intuitive to switch.
don't blame AOL for customers being 'comfortable'.
That's the same reason most people give for using Eudora or Pegasus mail clients. Its not that these companies/products have 'locked customers in' or made it counter intuitive to switch, its simply that people have gotten comfortable, and they don't perceive enough value in changing.
(Not that there is anything wrong with Eudora or Pegasus. But most people using it aren't "choosing to use it", its simply the case that they've used it for so long its just what they use, it works, and they don't want any hassles.)
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...
Software Freedom Day!.
The AIM network is run by AOL, although it is separate from their dialup subscriber network. Even if they go under it's unlikely this would be shut down though, too many users and ad revenue. It would most likely be restructured or sold to another party. Even if it did shut down, everyone would just switch to msn or yahoo.
Their software wasn't just bloated, it was terribly buggy as well. Around 2001, I had a job at a help desk at a university. Sometimes we had people come in who had installed AOL's software on their Windows PC (usually 98 se), and then tried to connect to the university dial-up. The AOL software somehow managed to screw up something with Window's networking. Sometimes we had to do a reinstall of the networking components just to get things to work correctly again, even if they had already uninstalled all the AOL stuff.
That's not true at all. At one time, they provided a crucial service to the PC users in this great nation: a boundless supply of free floppy disks, conveniently delivered almost daily right to our homes and offices. It was only with the demise of the floppy drive that AOL's reason for existence went away.
My boss does. $20 bucks a month we get charged just so she can use the "internet" as she likes too.
When she got a new computer running windows XP, I made sure to "install AOL". In reality I set AOL.com as her IE 7 home page, changed the shortcut icon and name, and locked down bits and pieces of the browser the best I could. Installing the abomination that is AIM completes the illusion. she has had a hard time adapting to the "new"AOL but accepts it as is.
We do still pay $20 bucks a month for AOL though. I can't seem to break that one out. At least the book keeper is helping me.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
And we are still feeling repercussions from the burst...
Because you can't take your aol email account with you. We need email address portability! Gah thinking about that as an idea makes my head wanna plode.
...were as hard as quitting your account with AOL.
Employees would get another three months of employment rather than terminated immediately.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
AOL's trained its employees too well.
Boss: You're fired!
Employee: Sorry, AOL employees only accept termination notices between the hours of 1:13am and 1:16am, Ugandan time. Please call back at this deliberately inconvenient time. Until then, we will continue to bill you for our services.
Boss [several hours later]: OK, now you're fired!
Employee: Sorry, please hold.
Boss [several hours later]: Look, you're freaking fired!
Employee: OK, I'm going to sign you up for one more month of free employment.
Boss: I don't want a month's free employment, you're freaking fired, you stupid cretins!
Employee: I'm sorry, we accidentally disconnected that call. Please begin the process again.
Management may want to fire them. If the employees have learned anything from their time working there, it'll be next to impossible to make them actually leave. Karma's a bitch.
hummmm Eudora supports Imap.. he could jsut use that to connect to exchange and then move his messges into the imap storage via Eudora and then open up outlook.. not that hard.. (i assume you have exchange sence he is wanting to move to outlook)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
AOL was among the first to profit from the discovery that the future of online services didn't lie with the Geek - and with a half-dozen or more arcane clients for the BBS, FTP, TELNET, USENET, IRC chat, etc.
AOL pioneered flat monthly rates, automatic updates. There were perfectly intelligible reasons why users became comfortable with dial-up AOL and why they remain comfortable with portals like Yahoo now.
Heh, they had cool CD cases for a while too. I think I still have the tin ones. I got a weird wooden one from my boss who didn't want it. So I use that to carry around my "action pack" CDs to unfuck people's computers. The look on peoples faces when I bring out that case is priceless: "Dude I asked you to fix my computer. You're going to fix my computer with AOL 9.0?"
Back in 1985 or so, I worked for a software house (video games and educational software, as it happened) and due to a number of factors which can be conveniently lumped under "bad management", they had to institute massive layoffs. "Black Monday" we called it. No warning, no hint of anything to come ... just "there'll be a meeting at 9:00." As we were heading towards the meeting room, our manager pulled me and another programmer aside and said, "Not you two. See me after the meeting." So we went back to our desks and waited, figuring that we were about to get fired or something. Whatever it was, it couldn't be good. But next thing you know, another one of the guys I'd worked with came back from the meeting. Didn't say a word, just made a motion like he was swinging an axe.
... all gone. For my part, I was expected to not only continue my current projects, but to also take over the work of half a dozen others. "You have to work 100 hours a week! We have commitments!" I was told. I pointed out that they should have thought of that before they laid off everybody. I lasted another six months ... couldn't take the pressure. One week I worked straight through from Monday morning to Friday afternoon (I went home for an occasional shower and came right back) and my supervisor told me that if I got the product into QC by Friday I could take the next Monday off. So I did, and the bastard tried to renege on the deal. I took it off anyway: being fired didn't seem so bad right about then. As it happened, when I showed up for work the following Tuesday all he said was, "How was your day off?"
In one swell foop, they killed off at least four fifths of the staff: programming, art and animation support, quality assurance, sales, marketing
I did notice, however, that not a single manager was let go, even though we really didn't need them anymore (ha, nobody to manage.) More to the point, those were the very people that ran the company into the ground. Yet it was the rest of us, the folks that actually created and sold the company's products, who paid the price for their incompetence. Typical, I suppose, but it explains why American businesses seem to be so full of fools and nitwits nowadays.
One late night, me and the other programmer who was kept snuck into the CEO's office, just to see what it was like on the other side. It was unbelievable: very well-appointed, shall we say, On top of that, through a door in the back we found a complete private sauna and jacuzzi! Wasn't like it was his company: he was just hired by the parent corporation to run the place. Spent money like water though.
Last I heard, they'd moved to California and were selling Activision game cartridges.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.