5 ms·
AOL
by wvenable 3y ago
AOL
- bsimpson 3y agoDidn't AOL buy Netscape? There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoAOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.
- squiffsquiff 3y agoYou make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThey were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.
- lmm 3y agoBy the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.
- panick21_ 3y agoNetscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.
- purerandomness 3y agoIt's not that simple. Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case. Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
- panick21_ 3y agoMicrosoft was the overwhelming majority of all installations. So effectively, once Microsoft added it, it was a utility. I'm well aware of that history.