The AOL Roller Coaster 95
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: (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
AOL's Somewhat Rewritten History (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:As a resident of the Rest Of The World... (Score:2, Insightful)
Family Friendly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, what does AOL really have to offer? (Score:1, Insightful)
The Internet now has a ton of darn good content. At this point, no one company could ever hope to offer a meaningful supplement to the huge choices already available. The idea of AOL charging for "special content" just doesn't make sense anymore. Popular content is now free by definition (wikipedia, google, youtube, P2P, etc.).
The idea of AOL as a provider of bandwidth doesn't make sense -- AOL doesn't own the last-mile pipes into people's homes, so here they are nothing but a middleman, unnecessarily jacking up the cost of service.
Maybe AOL can carve out a niche as a "hand-holder" for novice users; but that requires manning expensive support phones. It's not clear to me that a company can make a profit offering support contracts to the domestic market, where the price points are so low.
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.
What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple community? Tech savvy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I'm a software engineer who deals mostly with kernel level development. I run linux because I like to have more control over how things work (one of your points I agreed with). But none of this means that I wouldn't want things to be simpler. Here's the thing, when a computer is designed such that that tasks you want to do are simpler to get done, you are more productive. Of course the tricky part is that everyone wants to do different things with their computers. So software designers tend to go with what most people want to do and make things like email, web browsing and word processing the easiest tasks to do.
I guess my point is, I see what you are saying, but tech savvy and wanting things easier/simpler are not mutually exclusive.
proxy
Re:Seriously, what does AOL really have to offer? (Score:3, Insightful)
That won't work well, as most tech-savvy people are smart enough to see through the guise.
A good way back (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:0wned, no doubt about that (Score:2, Insightful)
Name Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, it is possible for the company to turn a large profit without that market (IMHO, IANABA*)
The major problem they face is a image problem, a lot of people who might like a service like AOL have already herd that "AOL Sucks, never use their service". Without debating the validity of that statement, I think most of these people could be fooled by a corporate name change. The people that will see through it probably won't use AOL in any form no mater what, so it doesn't matter, as far as AOL is concerned.
Along with a name change, the new company would need something to make it different from the 5million other ISPs out there. As some have suggested, I think providing a "Safe internet" would be a good one. No content provider is going to win customers by having "special content no one else has". However, the fact is there is a lot on the internet that average people would prefer to avoid. If the new AOL could convince people that it provided a useful and interesting, pre sorted and approved subset of the great big internet; while at the same time allowing people to venture outside the "Safe zone" if they are feeling adventurous, they could carve out a market. Particularly of families where parents don't care to monitor their children and decide what is "appropriate" for them; they could (and I think would rather) someone like their ISP do it for them.
This, as I see it, is what it will take to "turn AOL around".
*IANABA == I am not a business analyst
Re:0wned, no doubt about that (Score:1, Insightful)
The same computer that gay people use? You're an obese twelve year old in Nebraska, I hope. I hope.
When you have actual money someday, and you have the choice between fiddling for days getting your kernel recompiled to work with some $12 video card, or having sex, you'll probably opt for the Mac, too. That's what I did, anyway.