Now, with Steve Jobs' ego being deflated like the Hindenburg, Apple decides the only way to save themselves from Power Computing (which is, all things considered, a creature of their own making) was to modify the old axiom, "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em out!" (which, consequentially, sounds a lot like they borrowed the idea from Bill Gates...) and bought out Power Computing. This has largely ended up angering the Mac crowd, with users defecting to the Wintel behemoth in droves, and the ones who are staying with the platform doing so begrudgingly. Still, with the losses that Apple has been posting recently, one has to wonder where Apple is getting $100 million to spend on Power Computing (anyone down around Cupertino notice any suspicious looking bake sales lately?) This is one of the fundamental flaws in having the hardware platform and the operating system controlled by the same company. The Mac platform has diversified some, but not enough to ensure that it would survive Apple's impending demise. Now that they have lost a significant chunk of their market share to the very cloners that were going to save the Mac, it appears that I might want to crawl out of the den sometime soon and buy a few sympathy cards for my Rabid Mac-user friends...
On the other hand, the great black hole of the Web is now expanding. AOL is now devouring CompuServe, adding a couple million more to it's subscriber base. Being a reformed CompuServe addict (from before the Internet was such a big thing, BTW) it's almost enough to make one take off their had in memory of CompuServe. Since AOL pretty much took over the onlnie world, Computserve has been in a period of decline. It has become a service primarily used by professionals, rich with it's own content (at a price, which causes the service to lose it's appeal to the common Internet consumer) which has been a major selling point for years. Another of CompuServe's selling points was it's stability and reliability. As anyone who isn't living in a cave knows, AOL is notorious for poor network reliability and accessibility, as well as an increasing dearth of content. (BTW, is anyone out there actually living in a cave? I'd hate to be wasting that phrase if nobody out there is living in a cave.)
Although I have never been a member of AOL before, and never plan to be, there is still a convincing amount of evidence that AOL has become the festering cesspool of the Internet. Sure, to the average luddite who was smooth-talked into that Packard Bell by someone aspiring to own a used car lot, AOL must look attractive. You're only paying a flat rate every month,and they even give you the disk (perhaps even 4 or 5 of them from before you even had a computer). The setup for AOL is an idiot-proof one-button job (which, considering the target audience, is just about all that they can handle. Even as I write this, some guy in the parking lot below is fumbling to disconnect his car horn which has been going off for 30 seconds straight while he tries to install a car alarm. To their credit (which isn't saying much), AOL has exploited their market very lucratively: Putting Idiots on the Internet where they should never be in the first place.
Of course, when they get there, one starts to see where the misconceptions about the Internet come from. Despite the marketing department's heady claims that they have doubles network capacity, the network remains slow, unreliable, and most attempts to connect to AOL will still result in the omnipresent busy signal. But that's just the beginning. With the flat-rate plan that sent AOL to the bottom of the compost heap of customer service, they now have more and more subscribers to deal with, and less and less resources to handle them. Despite this situation, AOL has found it's own perverse ways to profit from their shortcomings. With the flat-rate pricing, revenues have dropped dramatically. First of all, they went after their content providers, charging them "rent" to remain on the service. Because of this policy, AOL's content providers have been in mass exodus from the service. Online gaming at AOL is also no longer a free service, with AOL charging $2 an hour for games. This has backfired on them, as gamers just fnid other places on the Internet to play the same games for free.
But the most insidious attempts at trying to squeeze blood from a turnip at AOL come in the form of telemarketing. A major outctry ensued when AOL attempted to sell their subscriber list to telemarketing firms, causing what appears to be an about-face on the plan. Further inspection turns this into a very short game of "find the hidden agenda." AOL is covered with ads all over the place . Sure, it is true that one could say the same thing about most of the rest of the Internet, but some of the best sites on the Web are supported entirly by advertising, such as Hotmail. For a service that you pay for in the first place, you shouldn't have to be reading ads right and left. I do not have Isomedia shoving ads in my face every time I log into my account, and I am quite sure that the vast majority of people who use ISPs to connect to the Internet can also say the same thing. AOL, on the other hand, contains ads all over the place, but that isn't the worst of it.
Now it appears that AOL is attempting to use the captive audience of their support lines to try and make money. The hold music which AOL customers (or impending ex-customers, in many cases) is now being replaceds with advertisements for products. Somehow, one has to wonder how one is going to recieve a sales pitch for a modem when half of the users cannot get the maximum speed their modem can handle (In the course of my tech support career, I have heard 28.8 modems connecting to AOL at 2400!) It has now become policy that when an AOL tech support rep is done with a caller, they are supposed to transfer the caller to a telemarketer! In a desperate search for money, they have also started charging exorbiant prices for the privilege of being a content provider on AOL. Consequentially, content providers have been leaving AOL in droves, opting instead for a larger Internet presence. Online gaming, once a big draw at AOL, was slapped with a $2/hour charge, which only served to drive AOL gamers to free alternatives on the Internet for the same games. With some of the more outrageous ways AOL is trying to make money, we have to wonder what they will come up with next. Will we soon see the day when Steve Case's community update is a "Make Money Fast!!!" chain letter?
Contributing to the rapid decline of AOL is the extreme lack of security that AOL will not admit to, but is well documented on sites such as www.aolsucks.org. content providers on AOL regularly find their pages being hacked, often carrying messages about how insecure AOL is (not surprising.) At times, these hacks have gone unnoticed by AOL for days. Among the hacker community, hacking AOL is no longer considered a challenge, and is often left to the 3L33+ 12-year olds and wannabes. Online events are regularly disrupted by hackers, and the guides can't seem to do much about them for some reason. This lack of security makes AOL a prime target for spammers, buth sending mail to and from AOL. The situation hsa become so out of hand that even an online confrence wiuth AOL seciruty chief Tatiana Gau was disrupted by hackers!
Quite some time ago, I posted a challenge in my column (probably about the last time I went after AOL) for someone out there to write a memory-resident program (not a virus, mind you) that will detect when an AOL disk has been inserted in the system, and automatically format it if accessed. So far, I have recieved no responses to this challenge. Surely someone else out there thinks that there must be a useful purpose to such a program. Anyone out there willing to give this a try?
(Note: A lot of the information in this article came from David Cassel's AOL list a pretty-close to weekly mailing list documenting the rapid transition of AOL to it's future chernobyl emulation mode. Recommended reading for anyone who is a recovering AOL user, or someone who just doesn't like AOL.