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AOL To Cut 500 Workers To Narrow Focus On Mobile, Video (bloomberg.com)
According to a report from Bloomberg, AOL is firing as many as 500 employees as part of a restructuring plan to focus on mobile, video and data. The move comes a year after Verizon acquired the company for $4.4 billion. Bloomberg reports: The layoffs are occurring in all of AOL's business units, said the person, who asked not to be identified disclosing the scope of the cuts. AOL employs about 6,400 people worldwide, the person said. In addition to the job cuts, the company will split into two parts, according to the memo. One will be dedicated to media properties, which include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and the other will focus on platforms, like AOL's advertising technology. "Mobile, video, and data are the key growth drivers of that strategy and the company will be putting resources into each of these areas," [Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.] With the wireless industry maturing, AOL parent Verizon has been buying up media and advertising-technology companies and working to refine go90, its free video-streaming service aimed at phone-toting teens.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I actually owned shares of them due to the AOL/TW merger, and I hacked SimCity because of them.
But even I thought they were dead.
What's next, CompuSerrve announces they are doing Internet 3 on Mars?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The good ol' days.
Redundancy?
Me too!
...why would anyone choose AOL, as opposed to the existing heavy hitters - Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al?
The 80s? Really? Floppies where still going strong into the mid 90s, and AOL was known for their spamming of CDs. They died in the late 90s with those same disks.
Besides the historical inaccuracies... The point is valid. AOL is still around?
yup, my ex still has an AOL e-mail addy. :/
Interestingly I can't forward email to her from my mailserver, AOL's servers bounce mail forward.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I never had to buy a blank floppy disk during high school in the 90s. I used to send out for them, every computer mag had at least two fill in card for them. I filled a shoe box with them and ever DOS game demos I could get through the mail. The AOL CD were junk. You couldn't reuse them.
Obama is still President. Theoretically he could still declare himself dictator for life and we wouldn't have to ever deal with Trump.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You've got mail!
That's probably a DNS problem:
https://www.rackaid.com/blog/e...
They probably can't verify the message and regard it as spam.
I remember them from the late 90s when they handed out those shiny hipster coasters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So we're screwed either way. Time to panic!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
AOL should logically remain around, they had all the necceary infrastructure to remain around, the had the staff to remain around. They unfortunately also had lame arse bean counter psychopath monetisers with spread sheets who ensure their demise due to a profound lack of creativity. The creative types kick off companies and then the manipulative psychopaths take over with their bullshit promotion gaining spreadsheets and drive out the creative types (as the bean counters try to take credit for what ever the creative types still managed to do on the way out) and the company proceeds to die.
If companies want to survive over the long haul they need to test employees for psychopathy and let someone else employ them, preferably a competitor.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
the company will split into two parts, according to the memo. One will be dedicated to media properties, which include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and the other will focus on platforms, like AOL's advertising technology.
They split the more profitable advertising from the less profitable media properties. Expect more bitterness for the later.
The AOL CD were junk. You couldn't reuse them.
There are some hobbyists that collect AOL CDs. There were more than 4000 different AOL CDs sent out over the years, and some people have collected them all. If you have some rare specimens, they might be worth more than their weight in gold. Alas, I just tossed all of mine in the trash as soon as they arrived in the mail, unaware of the potential treasure I was holding in my hand.
Wow, I thought they died in the 90s.
The surprising part is that AOL still had 500 employees.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I know you are joking, but a few days ago I was reminicing about AOL and started to wonnder what the fate of their Stratus computer system was (the mainframe they ran the proprietary part of their service on). Did they tear down and junk it? Are parts of it sitting in a museum somewhere? Is it still intact and sitting idle, collecting dust in the room it used to operate in? Or maybe...it's still RUNNING? :::cue errie music:::
Every time I see an old AOL floppy or CD donated to a thrift store, with the recipient's address still on it; I entertain an idea that was put forth on rec.games.video.classic years ago...
Buy the disc, then put it back in the donor's mailbox with a note that says, "We know you threw this away. We don't like it when you do that."
This space unintentionally left blank.
I worked at AOL for 4 years. Layoffs happened every year like clockwork around the holiday season. Great people, shitty company.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The 80s? Really? Floppies where still going strong into the mid 90s, and AOL was known for their spamming of CDs. They died in the late 90s with those same disks.
Besides the historical inaccuracies... The point is valid. AOL is still around?
Ooh computer/internet history. Yes, the internet did not exist in the 80's. Well let me clarify the general public internet didn't exist. AOL 1.0 from what I recall arrived in 1994 and did indeed come on a single 3.5" floppy disk. Its competitors were Compuserve and Delphi. AOL had a leg up especially on Compuserve because it had a relatively rich application that ran on Windows 3.1 for a more user-friendly experience. However, you were stuck with their browser on their closed network and couldn't use Netscape Navigator or Mosaic (which Microsoft later purchased and turned into Internet Explorer). It wasn't until the late 90's when AOL began spamming their CD's and having shady recurring billing practices where they would often bill you long after you canceled. Oh and remember kids, it wasn't until the late 90's when broadband roamed the earth so this was all happening on boingy boingy dialup modems.
AOL, the internet service has been long dead. I'm not sure what their employees do. Sit around and play Minesweeper all day?
We'll make great pets
The AOL CD were junk. You couldn't reuse them.
I did - I seem to remember making a bathroom mirror out of a huge batch of them
You've got mail!
The guy behind the voice...Now An Uber Driver In Ohio
https://youtu.be/7fChTDzxcWI
Also Prodigy and GEnie.
I thought that they were acquired by Verizon. Didn't that happen as yet?
The floppies could still be used, once one flipped the write protect switch. The CDs were good only as coasters, and once on a PC Magazine back page (Abort/Retry/Fail), they showed some of the innovative ways those CDs were used - such as mudguards of trucks, and so on
AOL had merged w/ Time Warner at the height of the dotcom boom, but had split out again, which was probably when the internet service went dead. Wonder what they have beyond their web site. For the record, when Netscape was at its peak, during Netscape 4, I had joined Netcenter and so have a netscape.net email address, which I use to this day, using the AOL servers for IMAP and SMTP. Some of the mergers AOL was involved in did real damage. I just wish Netscape as a company had survived long enough to be eaten up by Google.
AOL had merged w/ Time Warner at the height of the dotcom boom, but had split out again, which was probably when the internet service went dead. Wonder what they have beyond their web site. For the record, when Netscape was at its peak, during Netscape 4, I had joined Netcenter and so have a netscape.net email address, which I use to this day, using the AOL servers for IMAP and SMTP. Some of the mergers AOL was involved in did real damage. I just wish Netscape as a company had survived long enough to be eaten up by Google.
Ow my eyes. You're making me think of the Netscape browser we don't speak of that AOL ruined... it bears the mark of the beast.
We'll make great pets
Actually, the last version of Navigator - Netscape 9 - was a FireFox clone, before AOL killed it. It was suggested to go either to FireFox or Flake. I tried out the latter before that one went EOL as well.
Actually, the last version of Navigator - Netscape 9 - was a FireFox clone, before AOL killed it. It was suggested to go either to FireFox or Flake. I tried out the latter before that one went EOL as well.
I'm referring to Netscape 6 which was AOL's disaster and then Mozilla split back off from them and Netscape 7 became based on their Mozilla engine. Regarding Firefox, that name came about at the 1.0 release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We'll make great pets
In the '80s they were known as QuantumLink, an online service for Commodore 64 and 128 users. They did not become AOL until 1991.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50