AOL for Broadband. Will someone explain this to me?
AOL I get. It's an antiquated dialup ISP which did quite well in its day, where it stood alongside Prodigy and Compuserve. Despite the ubiquity of superior alternatives, AOL is still around, despite their adherence to a terribly engineered browser and software which infests your PC like a virus.
Personally, I've never used AOL, but I've spoken to some individuals (names not mentioned to protect those involved) who don't distinguish between AOL and the Internet. I suppose that ignorance plays as large a part in this as misplaced loyalty.
But when you talk about paying AOL $130 for installation and an additional $10 per month to be a member when you already have a broadband connection, I become baffled. Their proported features? Enhanced parental controls, (available free), pop-up blocking (also free), spam-blocking (freee), a firewall (which I'm nearly certain most AOL users won't configure, but you can get firewall software free), seven e-mail accounts per customer (email has been free for a long time), and a free web page (free free free).
When I see the AOL adds, I see other vendors names highlighted. McAffee AntiVirus! They're not even selling their own products anymore!
Will someone just explain this to me? They're still in business, so someone's buying.
Ah, yes -- 1989. The first time anyone ever heard the voice of Elwood Edwards saying "You've got mail!" (Anybody remember AppleLink?)
The Readers' Digest answer to Greg's question is a single word -- "Marketing." From the early days, AOL was sticking floppies (and later CDs) everywhere. Magazines, supermarket checkout lines, everywhere. A few years back, I found an AOL CD glue-sticked to the bottom of my American Airlines "meal."
A slightly longer answer to the question is that, IMO, Time-Warner is carrying AOL. As near as I can tell, the AOL part of the business loses money each and every year and has been doing so ever since flat-rate pricing started. Of course, it's really hard to tell who's making money and who's losing money these days because of all the creative accounting going on in the world, so I could be wrong about that. But I don't think so. "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."
It might be useful to remember that AOL is not, strictly speaking, an ISP but rather a private BBS that is connected to the Internet. The distinction may seem trite, but it is important from a technical, marketing and user point of view. From my perspective, everything started with CompuServe. I was able to connect to the ARPA Net (which would evolve into the Internet beginning in 1985) in the 1970s and 80s, but only from work and only because I could telnet into servers at places like M.I.T. and Cal-Tech -- DEC customers that gave us access to their networks because we worked for DEC. It's important to remember that the ARPA Net part of the universe was totally separate from the consumer milieu at that time.
The consumer on-line world circa 1980 comprised public and private bulletin boards, college and university nets not plugged into ARPA and dial-up service bureaus, most of which charged a fee. Like a lot of people in the 1980s, I had a CompuServe account (just call me old 70044,410). CompuServe had a lot of techies for members and some really good content, but it wasn't all that easy to navigate. You dialed in and you got a menu. Some people called it Compu$erve because pricing was by the minute, based on modem speed. I guess the theory was that since you can download more stuff in a minute at 9600 baud than you can in a minute at 300 baud you should pay more.
CompuServe was started in 1969 as a way to access H&R Block (the tax guys) mainframes from outside the office. eMail came in about 1979 or 1980. I got my first CompuServe account around 1984. As I recall, they charged about ten cents a minute for a 300 baud connection. In 1984, about the fastest modems around for dial-ups were 9600 baud and no one could afford one. If I hadn't worked for a computer company, I wouldn't have been able to buy the dumb terminal (around $600) and 300 baud modem (another $200) to get on-line. There were PCs, but at $3500 (and up) a pop they were out of my price range. I suppose I could have bought a TRS80 or a Commodore or something, but why bother? I could get stuff from work for nothing.
By the end of the 1980s, "big" BBSs were springing up like toadstools. One remarkable entry was Prodigy (Sears Roebuck and IBM) -- $10 a month, flat rate and no downloads. Perfect for little kids, or it should have been. The trouble was, it was slow and every screen scrolled ads for Sears stuff. The joke around the office was that Sears took everything they knew about computers and IBM took everything they knew about retail sales and the result was Prodigy.
I tried a lot of them, but stuck with CompuServe for the content and large techie population. Around 1990, I signed up with the first (!) commercial ISP -- "The World." It was run by a company called Software Tool and Die (they're still around -- std.com). You got a UNIX shell account and that was about it. The point being, if you don't know UNIX save your money. I could now dial in from home and telnet places and ftp files around. Between The World and CompuServe, I was spending between $50 and $150 a month to be on-line at 2400 baud in 1990.
AOL started out like CompuServe, but quickly realized they had to make the thing easy to use in order to attract newbies who suddenly found they could afford a PC. They licensed a DOS-based GUI from a company called GeoWorks. I test drove it for a month or so because a lot of my students were asking about AOL, and I wanted to see how it stacked up against CompuServe. I was really impressed with the GUI because it was simple and it worked pretty well. PC users were still mostly using DOS then, since Windows apps were crash-prone (as was Windows itself). Trouble was, AOL had no content to speak of. Certainly nothing like CompuServe. That GeoWorks front-end was the beginning of AOL software.
The big jolt came in 1995 when AOL, with no warning, training, support or preparation of any kind, dumped it's entire brain-dead user community onto the Internet. The rest, as they say, is history. The USENET exploded in flames as AOLers posted questions like "how do I send mail to everybody on the Internet?" and "how do I download a file?" to places like comp.lang.fortran. Phone lines were jammed with crazy people trying to dial in to their local AOL node so they could be "on the Internet." Crackers were overjoyed, because AOL security was almost nonexistent and the majority of AOL users were, well, not very bright. Phishing was born on AOL.
With each succeeding revision, the AOL software got fatter and less compatible with everything else out there. Even AT&T didn't manage to screw things up as badly as AOL. When broadband access came along, things looked really bad for AOL. Why should anybody pay AOL for a dial-up when they could just sign up with the local Telco or CATV company? That's when some marketing weenie came up with the "bring your own access" marketing model for AOL. Why does it work? Simple -- the same reason people don't like to change their phone numbers. Remember all the pissing and moaning the cell phone companies did when the Feds finally got around to passing laws to let people hang on to numbers? One way Sprint or Verizon or any of the others keeps people locked in is to force a new number if they change carriers.
AOL has had chances to get it together, but has blown it more than once. For instance, why did AOL buy Netscape, then ignore it in favor of a brain-dead MSIE port to use as their default browser? Beats me. Why doesn't AOL support POP eMail clients? Who knows.
Why they stick with proprietary software is simple. It's how we used to sell computers in the bad old days. We build the box. We write the OS. We might even write the apps. Once you buy, you're stuck unless you want to pony up big $$$ to switch vendors. AOL is the same way. It's easier to stay with them then it is to switch. As for why new users sign up -- Marketing.
Think of AOL like McDonalds, and consider the following two questions: "Who makes the worst hamburgers in the world?" and "Who sells more hamburgers than anyone else in the world?"
My opinion, for what it's worth.
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