The AOL Roller Coaster

eldavojohn writes "There's a lengthy article at Information Week about AOL's history. A lot of us are familiar with AOL's history but few of us realize that it sits at a crossroads today where it could potentially find its way back into consumer's pockets — something it's tried to do before in a hit-or-miss fashion. From the conclusion of the article, one analyst states: 'Ironically, although you'd think AOL should dump its family mentality in light of its competitors like Yahoo, the key to AOL future branding success vs. Yahoo could be to actually capitalize on its family friendliness alongside targeting the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple.' AOL has been met with many problems as of late, but can they pull themselves out of the hole this time?"

Dear AOL:

...die in a fire. A nasty, painful fire.

The article kind of glosses over that time that AOL released its users onto the Internet at large with absolutely no barriers or training, even an indication they were really not on AOL.

One of my funniest memories of that time was when someone had a webpage up criticizing AOL, and an AOL admin/cop/whatever contacted him and seriously explained that the webmaster was violating AOL's terms of service, and to take the webpage down immediately or have his AOL account terminated.

People looking for examples of how a corporate entity will gang-bang a shared service at the first opportunity need look no further than AOL and its toxic bus-load drop-offs onto the net.

Next time, mention that in a "History".

Or die in a War?

AOL VS The Internet:

http://www.airsho.com/PCwebster/aol_users.htm [airsho.com]

A good way back

Well, an excellent way for them to make a comeback is if they did a complete overhaul and focused on providing a heavily filtered version of the Internet in all forms, in an attempt to make it as safe from crime, viruses, and nasty content as possible. Wi

As a resident of the Rest Of The World...

What the hell is AOL?

No really...

Re:

So basically its like a crappy MSN?

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... that used to require that you install software that essentially took over your computer and was impossible to completely remove.

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So yeah, it was basically just like MSN.

AOL's Somewhat Rewritten History

That's funny. "...at the forefront of the Internet revolution".

AOL was the last of the big BBS' to move to the internet, dragged kicking and screaming into ISP-dom by the flight of its subscribers to services that provided internet mail, usenet, ftp and uucp.

About ten thousand of Jack Rickard's army of sysops were offering internet services before AOL's tentative entry. Hardly "a company that was once ahead of its time", AOL nearly didn't make it at all.

Family Friendly?

I don't know if family friendly is a word I would use with AOL. Every browsed their own chat rooms? You see a lot of user created room names like M4M in various forms. Also, AOL is more a content provider now than just an ISP. Your average ISP is not AOL/Time Warner. They give away their music videos (music.aol.com). I wonder how they will make money with their free service. Lastly, all you needed to do to use the internet without AOL in the days of dial-up was login to AOL, and then minimize it.

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It did not use to be that way. Somewhere along the way, a business guy took over and decided that those kinds of controls were not needed. Once they allowed it to be ran similar to the internet, then there was no advantage to them. Worse, they have remaine

AOL still has my Dad as a customer

We started off using AOL when they had all the free trials gear for dialup. When we'd get through a free trial, we'd just use another credit card. Now, Dad pays for Unlimited Dialup (broadband not available at his house) with them. He knows there's cheaper, and in almost every other aspect he shops around. But they Woo'd him in the beginning, probably with the email account for everyone in the family and the "kid-safe" chatrooms. I don't know any other ISPs (atleast in Australia) that run their own (easy to access for the not-so-technically inclined fold) chatrooms, and I think it's a good idea - people are basically forced to behave by the fact their username is tied to a service they're paying for. I still think AOL are good in this respect. Other than that, yes, AOL should "Die in a fire", as the OP states.

Apple community? Tech savvy?

Most of the people who I know who use Macs were recommended them (and recommend them to others) because they want things to be easy and simple.

This *could* be an ideal market for AOL, I agree, but it's hardly tech savvy.

FWIW generally my experience is that the market is split into approximately four parts -
Those that want an easy life (running Macs)
Those that want complete control (running Linux)
Those that don't know what the options are (running Windows)
Those that have specific software needs (running any of the above).

The number of people in category one who could be described as tech savvy is not really all that high. You don't need to know a lot about the insides of a computer to decide that this one doesn't need much work to make it do what you want.

Re:

While I understand what you trying to say, I have to disagree with some assumptions you have made. Why can't someone who wants things to be simple be tech-savvy?

Personally I'm a software engineer who deals mostly with kernel level development. I run linux

It's the old joke:

Mac: For people who don't want to know why their computer works
Linux: For people who do want to know why their computers works
DOS: For people who want to know why their computer doesn't work
Windows: For people who don't want to know why their computer doesn't work

What?!

Have things really descended to the point that someone can seriously utter a phrase like, "the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple"? Apple's entire schtick, from the first Macintosh onwards, has been that their products don't require any kind of expertise, that they "just work", and that they produce the computer "for the rest of us" -- where "us" should probably not be construed to mean frequent Slashdot readers and users of Sourceforge.

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Apple's entire schtick, from the first Macintosh onwards, has been that their products don't require any kind of expertise, that they "just work", and that they produce the computer "for the rest of us" -- where "us" should probably not be construed to mea

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Hey, I run Gentoo, I resemble that statement! Hold on, my background emerge -uD is halting, gotta resolve some circular dependencies by tweaking my USE flags. Maybe I shouldn't have gone ~amd64 + crazy CFLAGS + roll-my-own ebuilds. Argh, why is my font

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I have to say as someone who worked in a large mac lab with mac and windows servers, that when I come home, I spend none of my time fixing my pc or my son's pc or my wife's pc.

I did have to spend a few seconds starting ClamWin through VNC on my wife's lapt

If they were smart

they would offer one of their free CDs with an OS set-up that includes everything that a user needs.

1. An internet connection.
2. A good browser; firefox.
3. A good Office (open office).
4. Games.
5. and an optional OS of Linux.

And it would be good if they went back to having cleaned up chat rooms, even though I suspect that that boat sailed.

"...the ISP for people who didn't know any better"

AOL recently aced PC World's list of the top 25 worst tech products of all time. [pcworld.com] .

I don't think they were all bad. They did send me all those nifty coasters, frisbees, and BB targets.

Re:"...the ISP for people who didn't know any bett

Having PCWorld rate the top 25 worst tech products is a lot like Sadaam Husein rating the worst leaders and not even including himself.

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AOL and Compuserve (remember them?) were great in the pre-CD era. I never bought floppy disks. Whenever I was low, I'd call up their free numbers and tell them I was interested in a free trial. They'd send me the disks, which I would promptly wipe and r

Re:-1 Flamebait: The solution to pulling out

To the non tech savvy, tech savvy now means "buys gadgets."

The actual tech savvy, of course, are the people who pick the broken and discarded gadgets from the "tech savvy"'s trash and make new and interesting gadgets from their bits and pieces.

God I love early adopters.

KFG

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And now AOL wants to reach out to the "tech-savvy" segment? Do they not understand that the tech-savvy have spent the last 10 years laughing derisively at the AOL brand name? They would be much better off developing a new brand name for that purpose.

That

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Riiight. Because tech-savvy people only work on the cheapest hardware they can find with open-source operating systems. Everyone else is just playing pretend.

Well, uhm, yeah. More or less. Being tech-savvy obviously means that you understand the tradeoff