AOL axes another 2,000 jobs America Online is slashing another 2,000 jobs worldwide - about 20 per cent of its workforce - as it continues to morph from online service provider to a company hoping to make its money from web sites you can advertise on. The cuts were announced via an internal memo from CEO Randy Falco, The Associated Press reports. "This …
Abandon ship, last one off the boat has to explain what the hell happened to The Stockholders.
The hilarious thing is that they actually were a good ISP, with good speeds, customer support, and crucially *no caps*, they would clean up.
The market could sure as hell use a decent ISP right now, certainly more than another ad broker.
I've never heard anyone say that AOL was a good ISP, their insistence on you using their AOL software, while good for newbies, was entirely too limiting. The costs (at least in the UK) have never been competitive, apart from the ability to get a free months web access with them, which they would extend almost indefinitely as long as you rang up saying you weren't sure every month when the free month came to an end!
That was a good deal! I'll give them that!!
OK, I'll grant you that, but their software was nothing more than a virus that one had to play a monthly fee for the privlege to use. If I had $50 buck for every time I fixed a computer by uninstalling AOL and reinstalling it, oh wait... I do, and it bought me a new truck, digital camera, a couple of tv's and a whole bunch of rounds of pints down at the bar...
I hated AOL but they made me a reasonably wealthy man... Now the bastards have to go belly up... Figures...
I'm not advocating AOL's service, but you've got to hand it to them - they made using the Internet easy for the masses. AOL was good at what it did and enjoyed unprecedented success as an ISP.
Now, if only they could figure out how to get people to pay $3 an hour again they might be able to rehire those terminated employees.
It used to be easy to spot an internet retard, you just looked for the @aol.* on their email address (I know of two sites which simply banned AOL users based on the proportion of stupid questions they used to get). It looks like it will be much harder in the future.
And I'm sorry, they were never a "good ISP", simply provided "internet for dummies".
As an AOL customer for 3 years can't say I'm surprised. Their customer service ended up diabolical, the foriegn call centers refused point blank to contact supervisors when they could not resolve issue & the British side simply advised they MUST contact their supervisor upon request - call them again.
Good bye - its been a blast AOL (not)
I do feel for the staff though - no doubt the untrained staff which made life so difficult will now be compitent, at least they will hopefully get better jobs.
if AOL disappear along with the "@aol.com" flag just how the heck do we identify all the computer numpties out there?
P.S. my best friend used to run a great service for our town . . .
somehow AOL had managed to set his unique business post code on the address of most of the people on their mailing list in our town - so he got ALL the CDs for the town on each mailshot - result!
(OK, he didn't laugh too much, especially after the first 6 months - no sense of humour really)
Unless you have an absolutely compelling offering the closed network is a dead-duck. You can even get Lexis-Nexis on the web these days. This is a classic case of the world changing and the company hasn't. My first domestic Internet connection was through AOL circa 1996 and for what they were, they weren't too bad but I can't help but feel they're still stuck in 1996. I just don't think there's any money in this business any more.
Now Ex AOL, the reasons being.
Crap software, thankfully you didn't need to actually use it or even touch it after installing the router
Having sold off AOL in the UK to carphone warehouse (Talk Talk) they then gave "free" bandwidth to their customers for nothing, so the people subscribing to AOL in the UK were paying for someone else to use up bandwidth. Less bandwidth means instigating an un"fair use" policy to cap use. No limit given that you are not allowed to go over, no warnings that you are about to go over the limit that you aren't allowed to know what it is then 1 month of reduced bandwidth 4.5Mb down to 36K.....for a month during peak hours(7am-12pm) whilst still paying for 4.5Mb. they don't even tell their own support people they have done it, took me about 3 or 4 hours on the phone with tech support about my slow connection to find out I had been "fair used"
Now paying half as much for twice the speed and no poxy viruslike software, with a limit of 100Gb of bandwidth a month...sorted
I have criticised AOL myself mainly due to the bloatware software but remember a few things.
AOL were just about the only dialup isp that had no cutoffs on their unmetered dialup package and still do I think.
On broadband they were also one of the last few to have unlimited with no traffic shaping on BTs ipstream network so they defenitly had their advantages.
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