4 ms·
DSL and cable killed them. I had aol until the cable company offered high speed and by that time I wasn’t really using AOL as a client as I had moved to Linux.
by flatiron 5y ago
DSL and cable killed them. I had aol until the cable company offered high speed and by that time I wasn’t really using AOL as a client as I had moved to Linux. My parents still used windows and had no problem just using Netscape/IE or whatever since the browser had by then become the killer app.
- jl2718 5y agoMy take is that the independent dial-ups killed their ISP business long before cable (1996). Then came their $2/mo IP-only service, which was okay, but slow to develop new features. Then came the AIM days, which seemed to dominate an entirely new epoch of the internet, the P2P era, although nobody was making profit. Next was the cloud/advertising/platform epoch, and they disappeared. No effort at all to win that market, develop something new, or to extend the relevance of AIM by integrating with social platforms. If I had to guess, I’d say that Time Warner destroyed their investor appeal. Wall Street was ready to fund 10 years of internet innovation losses, but not for old media. Throwing away investor money like that is just shockingly obtuse, had to be a decision made by a hostile board that was taking a cut of the merger.