Slashdot Mirror
Is AOL Finally Crashing and Burning?
An anonymous reader writes "AOL's disastrous quarterly report showed cash from continuing operations was down 44% from a year ago (adjusted operating income was down 37%), as it continues a rocky transition from monthly subscription fees to advertising. (Their quarterly report also notes 'the cessation of large-scale access subscriber acquisition campaigns' — investor-speak for the fact that AOL will finally stop mass mailings of free trial accounts.) Unfortunately, AOL's advertising business 'did even worse. Its revenues declined by $110 million... every single segment is down.' AOL has already lost 86% of the 30 million subscribers it reported in 2001 — down to just 4.3 million — but advertising hasn't yet filled the gap (possibly because many AOL ads had been displayed to the users AOL no longer has). But at least, as one technology blogger notes, AOL has finally released a mobile application, 'in the new definition of "late to the party."'"
First, they should change their name to America Still Serves Here On-Line Everyone, or ASSHOLE. Then they should give free service to every one who bought stock in TimeWarner-AOL when experts proclaimed them to be the most important player in history of media and journalism only ten years ago. Stock that went from, what?, $100 a share to 10 cents a share?
Then give free WIFI to everyone whose pension or 401K lost a significant percentage of its value because money managers believed this nonsense.
Then have a live web-cam reality web show about the lives of the ultra-rich who took all the money from the investors and pension managers and are now living billionaire lives behind closed doors. People like Steven Case and Gerald Levin, remember them from ten years ago? New-Era Business visionaries? Can I get you another drink, sir? Both could be recycling their business talents supervising the night cleanup crew in a bowling alley on the outskirts of Tijuana. Or how about that chicken-brained affirmative-action fuckhead Perkins? Surely there is a high-school in some ghetto somewhere that he can go be a vice-principal in somewhere.
Jeez, don't get me started. Americans get what they deserve. People generally do, eventually.
Loved your post about your AOL work experience, Pezbian. It's the kind of writing that keeps me reading through the inane general comments on Slashdot looking for gems like yours.
You imply all Americans deserve to lose everything because a few douchbags got greedy?
I'm sure your homeland is a paragon of civility, honor and integrity. You're such a shining example, after all.
Smells like Eurotrash, long as we're making sweeping generalizations here.
I've lived in the USA all of my life. I've met a wide range of people from all social classes, ethnicity, and occupational backgrounds. I'm in my sixties, I hitchhiked across the USA many times in the 1960s. I've been around the world, but never to a communist country, Africa, or South America. I know Americans; I know America; I've seen America change over a half century.
America is doomed. And they deserve it. It's a nation of self-righteous, over-paid, ignorant peasants who took the greatest country on Earth and transformed it into strip-malled shithole. Other people in other countries have problems, sure, but nothing like this. And while, yes, I'm making sweeping generalizations here, they're all valid and true.
In my experience, the Europeans and other people in the civilized world aren't really interested in what happens to America and Americans anymore. They have more important things to deal with. We really don't matter to them anymore. We no longer have anything to offer them, and they don't find our Disneyland-based reality entertaining anymore.
If I had to sum up the entire 250 years of American vision, dream, and reality in one single image, it would be the 1975 television video of all the helicopters, arriving from the embassy in Saigon full of sleazy low-lifes desperate to come pollute the USA, being dumped into the ocean off the aircraft carrier to make room for more helicopters. All the greed, all the blood, all the lies, all the canned Jesus-sunbeam optimism, all the stupidity of the American experience in one image.
Watch for it, you'll see it again soon in a few years. Same image, but Baghdad instead of Saigon. Same war, same mentally-unbalanced people, different location, same result.