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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.
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!.
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.
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.