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?"

0wned, no doubt about that

[Anonymous Coward]

tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple

Truly, owned is good word to describe it. Apple is for brainwashed suckers who have more money than sense. Only a halfwit with no technical skills would exchange overpriced software (Microsoft) for overpriced hardware (Apple) and consider himself a tech-savvy person.

Run GNU/Linux [debian.org] on cheap/commodity hardware and you will not need any whoring analyst to tell you that you're a tech-savvy person.

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

[OnyxIR]

What the hell is AOL?

No really...

Re:-1 Flamebait: The solution to pulling out

[kfg]

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

If they were smart

[WindBourne]

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.

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

[alzoron]

So yeah, it was basically just like MSN.

Re:Aol

[Anonymous Coward]

ME TOO!

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

[WindBourne]

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

It's the old joke:

[blueZ3]

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

Re:What?!

[Urusai]

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 messed up? ALSA dmix broken, my tunes not working! Where's that Ubuntu disc? Must not...give in to...dark side...

I'm cancelling

[broKenfoLd]

Hi, I would like to cancel my subscription to this thread. No really. Please. I really don't want this subscription, please let me cancel. No you can't talk to my Dad. Please just unsubscribe me. Oh, 6 free months of this thread? I'll pay you to unsubscribe me. Therein lies AOL's yellow brick road to profit, make people pay to unsubscribe lol.

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

[TheRaven64]

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 re-use. CDs took all the fun away.