And what has a huge impact on the university's ability to educate? Funding. And, for a private institution, what most affects its ability to raise funds? Reputation. (Well, that, and dead alumni, but improving the latter statistic is illegal.)
Oh, and what else has a huge impact? Attracting talented professors. What affects that, assuming you now have the funding? Also reputation.
Reputation needn't be the primary goal, but it's the key means to that primary goal.
Just like the old shareholder/employee/customer triangle.
Does it even matter at all if he got the letter, if he lied about it or even if he told the truth about this company? It's very VERY clear he's telling his opinion and the moment people get fined for telling their opinion is the moment the US can be considerd on par with China and many other countries they can't stand. Emigrate while you can!
Other way around, actually - we did it first in the US, in the mid-90s. AOL has won several anti-spam lawsuits on the common-law trespass-to-chattel theory. Check http://legal.web.aol.com.
Given that, it's pretty funny to see a bunch of non-lawyer geeks arguing about the Revolutionary War and the Greeks just below here, ain't it?
I get nowhere near enough spam in my inbox to interfere with legitimate mail (although I don't doubt there are exceptions that do....)
It's not the exception, it's the rule. 30-50% of the inbound mail to AOL's mail gateways is spam, and even after massive filtering we all know that AOL users still see a lot of spam. You're the exception.
Also, only send money to someone you have called - and then only if the number is listed in their name! Don't trust Switchboard, etc.; you can modify your own listing online. Use XXX-555-1212 instead.
Check out that phone number on www.fonefinder.net and make sure it's a land line, not a cell phone.
I'm no fan of Microsoft's aggressive defense and expansion of their monopoly, but this isn't either.
Is it inappropriate for the USPS to allow ANYONE to advertise at the post office? Yes, I think so.
Does Microsoft taking a formerly "pristine", ad-free space and turning it into a commerce zone make me angry? Yes, as always.
Does what they're doing have ANYTHING to do with illegal coercion or other anti-trust behaviors? Nope.
If Sun and Oracle and Netscape had USPS displays, and Microsoft offered the USPS tons of money to sell XP - but *only* if they pulled down the other displays - *THEN* we're maybe talking anti-trust.
It looks like some of the RH higher-ups are dumping some stock in preparation for this buyout.
No, it looks like some of the RH higher-ups are selling some stock at the end of the tax year - gains to offset losses or vice versa, depending when those shares were purchases.
It's pretty common.
Why on earth would you SELL stock in preparation for a buyout? Presumably you will be paid more than the current market price for any shares you hold.
Where exactly do you get your inside knowledge of what goes on at AOL? News analyses, I'm guessing? I was there for nearly 12 years. I have a pretty good understanding of how things work. I may, of course, be wrong, but please don't assume that what you read in the Wall Street Journal is necessarily an accurate picture of the company. The media gets lots of stuff wrong.
Truth is, there is no strict chain of command at the top; CEO and COO and Chairman are not very hierarchical positions. Steve doesn't overrule Bob and tell him what to do by fiat.
So it's really a numbers game. Before the "TW coup": Two AOLers at the top (Case and Pittman), two TWers (Parsons and Levin). Today: Two AOLers at the top, one TW.
Now, that's different from what part of the company will make the most money - you may well be right that IP is more important than online access. AOL always thought that "content is key"; we just rarely had the greatest content.
But Steve and Bob have a big influence on the philosophy, no matter which part of the business is the profit center.
And this is exactly the biggest danger of AOL buying a company - and in one sense, it IS what happened with Netscape.
Don't worry about AOL taking an established, successful company with a real future and running it into the ground. Hasn't happened yet. (Netscape, GNN, CompuServe were already dying when we bought them. CompuServe is a relative success, GNN couldn't be saved, and Netscape has a new lease on life now that the MS contract is dead.)
Don't worry about AOL taking open stuff and making it proprietary. Hasn't happened yet either. (Everything that's proprietary at AOL started that way, and has slowly, if much-too-slowly, grown more open.)
Don't worry about TW's influence on the AOL side. There isn't any. Steve Case and Bob Pittman run the show.
Worry, instead, about people who simply don't want to be associated with AOL, cuz it isn't cool. Is it immature and short-sighted? Probably. Are geeks known for their maturity, social competence and rational decision-making? Not particularly.
Too bad, because when AOL buys a smaller company, that's usually what they're really buying - the brains behind it. Redgate got us Ted Leonsis. WAIS got us Brewster Kahle for a while. Netscape got us hundreds of net-savvy software engineers. Ditto CompuServe. Medior got us Barry Schuler - well, can't win them all.
It's stupid for Red Hat employees to announce they'll leave simply because they don't want a triangle with an O above their main entrance, but if they do, then THEY will have killed Red Hat, not AOL.
There is a bit of a difference between (a) adapting a "server" distribution of Linux into a "desktop" distribution and (b) expanding from software into cars!
I don't know any details about the custom hardware, but I believe it had something to do with (a) X.25 controller cards, (b) PDP clones or partial clones since the PDP was no longer made, or both.
People have mentioned that Winmodems would suddenly get Linux drivers if AOL bought Red Hat.
No evidence for this.
Evidence: AOL has very close working relationships with all modem manufacturers at both the developer and executive levels. Modems HAVE to work with AOL to be viable. That's a lot of influence.
At Red Hat, the techies are forced into battling other parts of the company that think it's a good feature (even though those people might not use Linux at all).
each company that has attempted to broaden their product line to attack MS has LOST
First, realize we're not sure AOL cares about Red Hat for the desktop at all. They may be interested in future net-appliances (people just don't give up on those, do they?). Or they may want it for the server farms. Either way, I suspect the goal is not to attack MS, per se, but to ensure that AOL is not dependent on the whims (and anticompetitive aggressions) of MS. Big difference.
It's never good to have your core business dependent on suppliers that (a) might not be around tomorrow or (b) won't necessarily act in your best interests. Why do you think there's a mix of HP-UX and Solaris running at AOL? Certainly not because of the similarities and ease of porting. Partly for the specific hardware configs they offer, yes, but largely to avoid a single point of (business) failure.
If Red Hat is, or can be made, stable enough, for AOL's server platform, then it's a great choice to further diversify the servers. But anyone who's been burned by a Cygnus support contract - and I suspect that would include anyone who HAS one - knows that you can't depend on them for fixes. Gotta buy them.
Similarly, if I were still at AOL, I'd be worried about what Microsoft will do for me in the future. IE integration bugs? Windows bugs or limitations that just happen to affect the AOL client? Remember DR-DOS.
Assuming you can create a novice-friendly desktop environment, which AOL excels at, getting Linux on the desktop could be a stable long-term alternative, because AOL could then ensure that the whole package works together. Any AOL-limiting bugs could be instantly fixed.
Sounds like a huge number of potential upsides for AOL, both short and long term.
Actually, I think that's the least frightening prospect of the whole thing, since you KNOW the AOL executives are gonna leave that thing alone. There's no strategic market value or power in a compiler, so even if AOL has evil motives or just dumb ideas, the compiler itself is going to remain safe.
And if AOL dev had any control over gcc, I can think of quite a few bugs that would have been fixed much, much more quickly. (The LONG_MAX nightmare comes to mind.)
What makes it so? Is it just that it doesn't happen to have a good desktop environment or easy administration today, or because for some reason (technical or philosophical) it never ever could?
Perhaps when mozilla gets to 1.0.0 they'll take another look at it?
The problem was not just the stability - until this past year, AOL was contractually bound to include *only* IE in their clients, in exchange for which Microsoft would include AOL on the Windows desktop. That contract was not renewed, and so AOL now has the freedom to do whatever they want browser-wise. The latest CompuServe beta has Netscape included, and I suspect if the stability is good the AOL client just might follow.
I think Andy's wrong in saying that being bought by AOL is a recipe for failure. Here's a list of acquisitions and how they looked from the inside:
- GNN: That was a flop. No question. It was also one of the first buyouts AOL ever did, and frankly, few people at AOL had any idea what to do with the Internet at the time (like much of the rest of the world). The clumsy attempt at infrastructure integration also hurt. At the time, we were still running on an old, clunky, non-modular architecture that was largely unchanged from its days running Q-Link and PlayNet. Also, if I recall, GNN used BookLink's browser, because we hadn't integrated IE yet. I'm surprised the AOL GNN lasted as long as it did.
- Netscape: I think that's going to be a ninth-inning major success. I think getting the Netcenter home page was certainly one goal, but another was hiring lots of experienced Internet developers, and that's been a HUGE win. Also, now that the Microsoft exclusive contract has expired, I definitely think AOL's gonna end up replacing IE with Netscape. The latest Compuserve beta has the Gecko engine. CS has a few million members, so it's a natural testbed for a technology before it goes into full distribution in the AOL client. Bang.. out of nowhere comes W3C compliance and serious competition for IE.
As for AOL failing to pick up Netscape's vision, well... I'm not sure Netscape had any particular vision by the time we bought them. Heck, most of their executive team did stay on and continue to run the show. Any lack of vision is simply something AOL failed to add, not something they took from Netscape.
- CompuServe: Took a dying service running on 36-bit PDP-10s running custom-made hardware (!) and managed to transition the vast majority of it to a web-based service using the AOL client as a dialer/browser. In effect, this is really the service we tried to create so many years before, but it worked this time. True, you never hear anything about it, but it's still more successful than MSN, so who cares?
- Time Warner: Waaaaay too early to call, but I think there will be some wins. These are two huge companies, and they are being very careful about trying to force them to integrate for buzzword's sake. When I left AOL in August, there was a big push to use AOL's developers as TW's technology infrastructure group, they were setting up ways to find-the-smart-guy-in-the-other-company, and they had combined the help-desk and other support infrastructure. I'm not sure how much difference it will make to end customers, but there are certainly efficiencies they can get as a company.
And don't forget about the less well-known purchases:
- Navisoft. Resulted in AOLServer, one of the best-performing web servers ever, which is free and open-source.
- WinAmp. Still doing fine.
- Personal Library Systems (www.pls.com). Resulted in some excellent intelligent-text-search functionality in the AOL service.
I think Red Hat could be great for a few reasons, aside from the obvious potential for giving Microsoft a run for its money, and creating a workable UI for Linux. Most importantly, AOL has one of the most demanding infrastructures of any site anywhere. We were regularly finding bugs in every OS we ran, even the fault-tolerant ones. And the AOL approach to system operation is fairly rigorous, requiring a lot of maintenance and reporting tools and 24x7 hot-pluggability of everything.
Red Hat could really become a leader in stability, performance and monitorability if AOL is buying it for their own back end.
You are making the assumption that given sufficient marketshare, AOL/TW wouldn't act exactly like Microsoft and try to gain as much control over their users, and that revenue stream, as MS ever did.
The difference between Microsoft and AOL's management style is the difference between Bill Gates and Steve Case.
Gates wants to increase Microsoft's power and control in order to increase revenues and market share. Steve just wants to increase AOL's revenues and market share; power is a byproduct, not the prime goal.
For the most part, when AOL makes an "evil" move, it is being more boneheaded than arrogant. Whenever I would argue against a bad (IMHO) decision, I would almost always find that the proponent honestly believed their idea would provide better, more interesting services to the customers, thus increasing usage and market share.
The difference is important: bad trade-offs can be argued against. If someone thinks an X% increase in functionality is worth a Y% decrease in "legitimacy", it's a lot easier to convince them that they're wrong (and people were always willing to be convinced). If someone thinks that an X% increase in power is worth a Y% decrease in anything at all, well.. you're screwed.
With one obvious and well-discussed exception, I don't recall any major decisions that intentionally limited functionality or spread FUD to create a monopoly. And AOL certainly never pressured suppliers or squeezed customers the way Microsoft does - I can't recall anything on the order of Licensing 6.0.
A favorite story: When AOL first launched, a 10% lifetime discount was given to "charter members". Later, we dropped our prices drastically (the $20/20 hours plan, I think it was), and the billing folks felt that this was already far more than a 10% discount, and so it met the letter of the charter-member promise. I disagreed, and I brought the issue up to Steve. He didn't even hesitate; he just said "We promised these people a lifetime discount." Boom. Charter members got 10% off the new, lower rates. (And I got a reputation for end runs, but such is life.)
Obviously, as the company grew, and Steve became less personally involved, this generalism became less true. Some percentage of people - especially in the media world - are going to be power-hungry bastards. But if AOL buys and subsequently destroys Red Hat, I suspect it'll be due to executive incompetence or bad timing, not Their Evil Ways.
I keep seeing that in this thread, but what exactly makes you think that? Even jwz, grouser extraordinaire, didn't make that claim when he left Netscape right after the buyout. He was concerned what what AOL might *mean*, but if Netscape is dead, what killed them was bad timing.
I was with AOL at the time, and I just didn't see any Netscape-killing happening. What I saw was a bunch of people who suddenly had lots of money, and who just didn't HAVE to stick around. The tiny startup they built just got bought out by AOL, which was well in the process of being demonized at the time. A lot decided it just wasn't worth the hassle of working for a big company.
About the only impact AOL might have had on Netscape was some boneheaded remarks made by one of the AOL execs at a Netscape employee meeting, thus lowering morale right after the merger. But after all, Netscape dev was still run by a Netscape exec. It's not as if 6.0 would have gone out the door earlier and bug-free if AOL hadn't bought Netscape. It just didn't happen in time.
I wouldn't write off Mozilla just yet tho. AOL had a license that *required* them to use IE in AOL, in exchange for placement of AOL on the Windows desktop. That license didn't get renewed, and I've seen press reports about a beta of CompuServe that integrates Netscape instead of IE. If that launches successfully, don't you think the AOL client is next? And how many web sites do you think will be Mozilla-compliant (and therefore W3C-compliant) then?
Slashdot Mirror
And what has a huge impact on the university's ability to educate? Funding. And, for a private institution, what most affects its ability to raise funds? Reputation. (Well, that, and dead alumni, but improving the latter statistic is illegal.)
Oh, and what else has a huge impact? Attracting talented professors. What affects that, assuming you now have the funding? Also reputation.
Reputation needn't be the primary goal, but it's the key means to that primary goal.
Just like the old shareholder/employee/customer triangle.
Does it even matter at all if he got the letter, if he lied about it or even if he told the truth about this company? It's very VERY clear he's telling his opinion and the moment people get fined for telling their opinion is the moment the US can be considerd on par with China and many other countries they can't stand. Emigrate while you can!
To sum up: Do the facts even matter? PANIC!
Other way around, actually - we did it first in the US, in the mid-90s. AOL has won several anti-spam lawsuits on the common-law trespass-to-chattel theory. Check http://legal.web.aol.com.
Given that, it's pretty funny to see a bunch of non-lawyer geeks arguing about the Revolutionary War and the Greeks just below here, ain't it?
I get nowhere near enough spam in my inbox to interfere with legitimate mail (although I don't doubt there are exceptions that do....)
It's not the exception, it's the rule. 30-50% of the inbound mail to AOL's mail gateways is spam, and even after massive filtering we all know that AOL users still see a lot of spam. You're the exception.
Jay the ex-Mail Guy
I don't block France... I just refuse to let them fly over my airspace.
Also, only send money to someone you have called - and then only if the number is listed in their name! Don't trust Switchboard, etc.; you can modify your own listing online. Use XXX-555-1212 instead.
Check out that phone number on www.fonefinder.net and make sure it's a land line, not a cell phone.
I'm no fan of Microsoft's aggressive defense and expansion of their monopoly, but this isn't either.
Is it inappropriate for the USPS to allow ANYONE to advertise at the post office? Yes, I think so.
Does Microsoft taking a formerly "pristine", ad-free space and turning it into a commerce zone make me angry? Yes, as always.
Does what they're doing have ANYTHING to do with illegal coercion or other anti-trust behaviors? Nope.
If Sun and Oracle and Netscape had USPS displays, and Microsoft offered the USPS tons of money to sell XP - but *only* if they pulled down the other displays - *THEN* we're maybe talking anti-trust.
A man looking eerily like William Kennedy Smith was overheard today at the Old Dominion Brewery, Ashburn, VA:
"The guy at Sports Authority tells me it will work my shoulder muscles and improve my swing. So I say, sure, I'll buy a lead bat."
It looks like some of the RH higher-ups are dumping some stock in preparation for this buyout.
No, it looks like some of the RH higher-ups are selling some stock at the end of the tax year - gains to offset losses or vice versa, depending when those shares were purchases.
It's pretty common.
Why on earth would you SELL stock in preparation for a buyout? Presumably you will be paid more than the current market price for any shares you hold.
You are fantastically mistaken.
Where exactly do you get your inside knowledge of what goes on at AOL? News analyses, I'm guessing? I was there for nearly 12 years. I have a pretty good understanding of how things work. I may, of course, be wrong, but please don't assume that what you read in the Wall Street Journal is necessarily an accurate picture of the company. The media gets lots of stuff wrong.
Truth is, there is no strict chain of command at the top; CEO and COO and Chairman are not very hierarchical positions. Steve doesn't overrule Bob and tell him what to do by fiat.
So it's really a numbers game. Before the "TW coup": Two AOLers at the top (Case and Pittman), two TWers (Parsons and Levin). Today: Two AOLers at the top, one TW.
Now, that's different from what part of the company will make the most money - you may well be right that IP is more important than online access. AOL always thought that "content is key"; we just rarely had the greatest content.
But Steve and Bob have a big influence on the philosophy, no matter which part of the business is the profit center.
So that's why I say AOL won the influence game.
Just so I'm following...
You left *TIME WARNER* because you didn't like *AOL's* philosophy?
I'd love to hear more about that, in private if you like.
And this is exactly the biggest danger of AOL buying a company - and in one sense, it IS what happened with Netscape.
Don't worry about AOL taking an established, successful company with a real future and running it into the ground. Hasn't happened yet. (Netscape, GNN, CompuServe were already dying when we bought them. CompuServe is a relative success, GNN couldn't be saved, and Netscape has a new lease on life now that the MS contract is dead.)
Don't worry about AOL taking open stuff and making it proprietary. Hasn't happened yet either. (Everything that's proprietary at AOL started that way, and has slowly, if much-too-slowly, grown more open.)
Don't worry about TW's influence on the AOL side. There isn't any. Steve Case and Bob Pittman run the show.
Worry, instead, about people who simply don't want to be associated with AOL, cuz it isn't cool. Is it immature and short-sighted? Probably. Are geeks known for their maturity, social competence and rational decision-making? Not particularly.
Too bad, because when AOL buys a smaller company, that's usually what they're really buying - the brains behind it. Redgate got us Ted Leonsis. WAIS got us Brewster Kahle for a while. Netscape got us hundreds of net-savvy software engineers. Ditto CompuServe. Medior got us Barry Schuler - well, can't win them all.
It's stupid for Red Hat employees to announce they'll leave simply because they don't want a triangle with an O above their main entrance, but if they do, then THEY will have killed Red Hat, not AOL.
There is a bit of a difference between (a) adapting a "server" distribution of Linux into a "desktop" distribution and (b) expanding from software into cars!
I don't know any details about the custom hardware, but I believe it had something to do with (a) X.25 controller cards, (b) PDP clones or partial clones since the PDP was no longer made, or both.
People have mentioned that Winmodems would suddenly get Linux drivers if AOL bought Red Hat.
No evidence for this.
Evidence: AOL has very close working relationships with all modem manufacturers at both the developer and executive levels. Modems HAVE to work with AOL to be viable. That's a lot of influence.
At Red Hat, the techies are forced into battling other parts of the company that think it's a good feature (even though those people might not use Linux at all).
:)
Sounds like a great match for AOL, then.
MSFT did not really build IE from the ground up - they started with several large bits of code and functionality from Spyglass, et al.
Ohhhhh yeah!
The things we forget.
Didn't CompuServe buy Spyglass and later sell it to Microsoft, along with some other ISP (spry.net maybe?) Or something like that?
each company that has attempted to broaden their product line to attack MS has LOST
First, realize we're not sure AOL cares about Red Hat for the desktop at all. They may be interested in future net-appliances (people just don't give up on those, do they?). Or they may want it for the server farms. Either way, I suspect the goal is not to attack MS, per se, but to ensure that AOL is not dependent on the whims (and anticompetitive aggressions) of MS. Big difference.
It's never good to have your core business dependent on suppliers that (a) might not be around tomorrow or (b) won't necessarily act in your best interests. Why do you think there's a mix of HP-UX and Solaris running at AOL? Certainly not because of the similarities and ease of porting. Partly for the specific hardware configs they offer, yes, but largely to avoid a single point of (business) failure.
If Red Hat is, or can be made, stable enough, for AOL's server platform, then it's a great choice to further diversify the servers. But anyone who's been burned by a Cygnus support contract - and I suspect that would include anyone who HAS one - knows that you can't depend on them for fixes. Gotta buy them.
Similarly, if I were still at AOL, I'd be worried about what Microsoft will do for me in the future. IE integration bugs? Windows bugs or limitations that just happen to affect the AOL client? Remember DR-DOS.
Assuming you can create a novice-friendly desktop environment, which AOL excels at, getting Linux on the desktop could be a stable long-term alternative, because AOL could then ensure that the whole package works together. Any AOL-limiting bugs could be instantly fixed.
Sounds like a huge number of potential upsides for AOL, both short and long term.
I don't want AOL controlling gcc.
Actually, I think that's the least frightening prospect of the whole thing, since you KNOW the AOL executives are gonna leave that thing alone. There's no strategic market value or power in a compiler, so even if AOL has evil motives or just dumb ideas, the compiler itself is going to remain safe.
And if AOL dev had any control over gcc, I can think of quite a few bugs that would have been fixed much, much more quickly. (The LONG_MAX nightmare comes to mind.)
Red Hat is a server OS company
What makes it so? Is it just that it doesn't happen to have a good desktop environment or easy administration today, or because for some reason (technical or philosophical) it never ever could?
Perhaps when mozilla gets to 1.0.0 they'll take another look at it?
The problem was not just the stability - until this past year, AOL was contractually bound to include *only* IE in their clients, in exchange for which Microsoft would include AOL on the Windows desktop. That contract was not renewed, and so AOL now has the freedom to do whatever they want browser-wise. The latest CompuServe beta has Netscape included, and I suspect if the stability is good the AOL client just might follow.
I think Andy's wrong in saying that being bought by AOL is a recipe for failure. Here's a list of acquisitions and how they looked from the inside:
- GNN: That was a flop. No question. It was also one of the first buyouts AOL ever did, and frankly, few people at AOL had any idea what to do with the Internet at the time (like much of the rest of the world). The clumsy attempt at infrastructure integration also hurt. At the time, we were still running on an old, clunky, non-modular architecture that was largely unchanged from its days running Q-Link and PlayNet. Also, if I recall, GNN used BookLink's browser, because we hadn't integrated IE yet. I'm surprised the AOL GNN lasted as long as it did.
- Netscape: I think that's going to be a ninth-inning major success. I think getting the Netcenter home page was certainly one goal, but another was hiring lots of experienced Internet developers, and that's been a HUGE win. Also, now that the Microsoft exclusive contract has expired, I definitely think AOL's gonna end up replacing IE with Netscape. The latest Compuserve beta has the Gecko engine. CS has a few million members, so it's a natural testbed for a technology before it goes into full distribution in the AOL client. Bang.. out of nowhere comes W3C compliance and serious competition for IE.
As for AOL failing to pick up Netscape's vision, well... I'm not sure Netscape had any particular vision by the time we bought them. Heck, most of their executive team did stay on and continue to run the show. Any lack of vision is simply something AOL failed to add, not something they took from Netscape.
- CompuServe: Took a dying service running on 36-bit PDP-10s running custom-made hardware (!) and managed to transition the vast majority of it to a web-based service using the AOL client as a dialer/browser. In effect, this is really the service we tried to create so many years before, but it worked this time. True, you never hear anything about it, but it's still more successful than MSN, so who cares?
- Time Warner: Waaaaay too early to call, but I think there will be some wins. These are two huge companies, and they are being very careful about trying to force them to integrate for buzzword's sake. When I left AOL in August, there was a big push to use AOL's developers as TW's technology infrastructure group, they were setting up ways to find-the-smart-guy-in-the-other-company, and they had combined the help-desk and other support infrastructure. I'm not sure how much difference it will make to end customers, but there are certainly efficiencies they can get as a company.
And don't forget about the less well-known purchases:
- Navisoft. Resulted in AOLServer, one of the best-performing web servers ever, which is free and open-source.
- WinAmp. Still doing fine.
- Personal Library Systems (www.pls.com). Resulted in some excellent intelligent-text-search functionality in the AOL service.
I think Red Hat could be great for a few reasons, aside from the obvious potential for giving Microsoft a run for its money, and creating a workable UI for Linux. Most importantly, AOL has one of the most demanding infrastructures of any site anywhere. We were regularly finding bugs in every OS we ran, even the fault-tolerant ones. And the AOL approach to system operation is fairly rigorous, requiring a lot of maintenance and reporting tools and 24x7 hot-pluggability of everything.
Red Hat could really become a leader in stability, performance and monitorability if AOL is buying it for their own back end.
Anyway, food for thought.
You are making the assumption that given sufficient marketshare, AOL/TW wouldn't act exactly like Microsoft and try to gain as much control over their users, and that revenue stream, as MS ever did.
The difference between Microsoft and AOL's management style is the difference between Bill Gates and Steve Case.
Gates wants to increase Microsoft's power and control in order to increase revenues and market share. Steve just wants to increase AOL's revenues and market share; power is a byproduct, not the prime goal.
For the most part, when AOL makes an "evil" move, it is being more boneheaded than arrogant. Whenever I would argue against a bad (IMHO) decision, I would almost always find that the proponent honestly believed their idea would provide better, more interesting services to the customers, thus increasing usage and market share.
The difference is important: bad trade-offs can be argued against. If someone thinks an X% increase in functionality is worth a Y% decrease in "legitimacy", it's a lot easier to convince them that they're wrong (and people were always willing to be convinced). If someone thinks that an X% increase in power is worth a Y% decrease in anything at all, well.. you're screwed.
With one obvious and well-discussed exception, I don't recall any major decisions that intentionally limited functionality or spread FUD to create a monopoly. And AOL certainly never pressured suppliers or squeezed customers the way Microsoft does - I can't recall anything on the order of Licensing 6.0.
A favorite story: When AOL first launched, a 10% lifetime discount was given to "charter members". Later, we dropped our prices drastically (the $20/20 hours plan, I think it was), and the billing folks felt that this was already far more than a 10% discount, and so it met the letter of the charter-member promise. I disagreed, and I brought the issue up to Steve. He didn't even hesitate; he just said "We promised these people a lifetime discount." Boom. Charter members got 10% off the new, lower rates. (And I got a reputation for end runs, but such is life.)
Obviously, as the company grew, and Steve became less personally involved, this generalism became less true. Some percentage of people - especially in the media world - are going to be power-hungry bastards. But if AOL buys and subsequently destroys Red Hat, I suspect it'll be due to executive incompetence or bad timing, not Their Evil Ways.
Actually, AOL has all but killed Netscape.
I keep seeing that in this thread, but what exactly makes you think that? Even jwz, grouser extraordinaire, didn't make that claim when he left Netscape right after the buyout. He was concerned what what AOL might *mean*, but if Netscape is dead, what killed them was bad timing.
I was with AOL at the time, and I just didn't see any Netscape-killing happening. What I saw was a bunch of people who suddenly had lots of money, and who just didn't HAVE to stick around. The tiny startup they built just got bought out by AOL, which was well in the process of being demonized at the time. A lot decided it just wasn't worth the hassle of working for a big company.
About the only impact AOL might have had on Netscape was some boneheaded remarks made by one of the AOL execs at a Netscape employee meeting, thus lowering morale right after the merger. But after all, Netscape dev was still run by a Netscape exec. It's not as if 6.0 would have gone out the door earlier and bug-free if AOL hadn't bought Netscape. It just didn't happen in time.
I wouldn't write off Mozilla just yet tho. AOL had a license that *required* them to use IE in AOL, in exchange for placement of AOL on the Windows desktop. That license didn't get renewed, and I've seen press reports about a beta of CompuServe that integrates Netscape instead of IE. If that launches successfully, don't you think the AOL client is next? And how many web sites do you think will be Mozilla-compliant (and therefore W3C-compliant) then?
Jay the ex-Mail Guy
Somehow, I just dont see that [AOL "overriding" Windows and launching Linux] happening.
Not as written, no. But can you imagine if the AOL CD included Linux as an optional install?
Realize that a frequent refrain given out by tech support is delete-n-reinstall. Think of the implications.
"I'm sorry you're having trouble getting online. We recommend you reinstall AOL, but this time select the 'format for LINUX' option..."