A-Oh-Well: Internet corpse sheds 500 workers

AOL, best known for being your parents' old ISP, is laying off 500 workers. The dial-up giant-turned-content-network will be shedding around 5 per cent of its total workforce as part of an effort to cull the ranks of its corporate operations. Multiple reports suggest that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been pitching the layoffs as …

[Martin Summers]

Do you know something. A walled garden ISP such as AOL could have quite a renaissance in this day in age given that the Internet has exploded and there's so much choice now of where to go and what to do. I imagine there's a large number of users who would benefit from being within the reasonably protected and curated walls of a closed network to go online. If marketed well it could have even worked as an over the top service for young kids for example.

AOL was I will admit, the first way I could get anywhere near online on my old 486 at home (plentiful access at high school thanks to ISDN) as for some reason it was less onerous on the machine than installing winsock and IE from the many discs it came on back then. I couldn't really view any content but the chat rooms kind of worked and I got my very first email address [e-mail] and my first webspace with a members.aol.com address. Ah the memories, shame it has come to this.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

"A walled garden ISP such as AOL could have quite a renaissance in this day in age given that the Internet has exploded and there's so much choice now of where to go and what to do. I imagine there's a large number of users who would benefit from being within the reasonably protected and curated walls of a closed network to go online."

Isn't Her Majesty's Government currently working on something like that?

[Martin Summers]

Touché, indeed they are. Well a walled garden with someone peeking over it in any case.

[HAL-9000]

Baaahhhhhh Humbug

Tis the season to be merry, tra la la la laaa laa la laa la la

Christmas did come early for some

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Baaahhhhhh Humbug

Yeah, but a pink slip is a lousy Christmas present. :(

[herman]

I had no idea that AOL still had 500 employees.

[TAJW]

I had no idea that we still had AOL.

[tiggity]

not quite dead yet

Still get mails from know a handful of people ("proper" contacts nmot random spam / junk mails) using aol email addresses as their main contact email

[Tikimon]

Lived it, hated it, bailed as soon as I saw an alternative

No walled gardens for me thanks. I was one of the millions who started with AOHell because their icon was on the desktop of a new computer. After years of slow service, limited content, and bandwidth wasting graphics (in the old days it was icon-blockers, not ads yet) I bailed for Earthlink. I eagerly traded the walled garden for the wild and vast forest outside.

I agree that some folks would indeed like the benefits you mentioned! But would it last? Enough times where their friends or family say "what, you don't have (app/site/game/etc)?" and those walls start to feel like a prison. I'm not sure how that would average out.