9 ms·

Facebook is the new AOL

202 points by r0h1n 12y ago

mschuster91 12y ago
In regards to Qualcomm dominance, thankfully there is no total domination yet - especially in the lower/midrange segment, where there is MediaTek (heh, and MediaTek is the 4th largest IC designer worldwide). And actually, I prefer MediaTek phones - you can root every single one of them and in contrast to other phone manufacturers, their preloader (first stage bootloader) even allows reading back the entire ROM. No restrictions. (For the interested, google for spFlashTool)
- vidarh 12y ago
  My 3 last phones have been MTK. The price/performance is much better in my opinion than most of the alternatives. Of course I won't get top range phones, but I'd rather get a new MTK based phone on a more rapid update schedule, and recently there's been some very high quality phones coming out (e.g. aluminium casing, gorilla glass and very high quality full hd displays) using MTK chips. My one caveat with them have been the dreaded weak GPS, but I don't need GPS much, and with my last phone that works fine too anyway (but anyone considering MTK based phones: if you need GPS, read reviews; on some it works fine, on others it requires some light modding, and on some it's practically impossible to get the GPS working without sacrifices to elder gods and lots of swearing).
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    Mediatek even seems to supply the entire software stack for the phones - and the hardware design part... well, just google for "gongkai" (http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107). No surprise that the speed of innovation with Mediatek chipsets is far bigger than the behemoths (Samsung)
    - OvidNaso 12y ago
      That user interface on the "gonkai" really looks like Rockbox(http://www.rockbox.org/ http://www.rockbox.org/).
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I agree. Qualcomm is dominant, but not quite "Intel-dominant" in mobile, especially when Apple makes another few hundred millions chips of its own. That said, it's becoming increasingly worrisome that so many OEMs just "default to Qualcomm" these days. If I were Samsung's CEO I'd put much stronger focus on making my own chips and putting them in my own devices (just like Apple), while also selling them to others, just like they sell their Super AMOLED displays and so on. I would also buy out AMD, mostly for their GPU expertise, but also to enter in the server/data-center market, which is more profitable than the mobile market. Samsung has the money and marketing clout to do much bigger things than AMD can do right now alone. I don't know what the hell Nvidia is doing in mobile, but they always seem to screw something up. Their non-focus on energy efficiency in "mobile" and their focus on "performance" for umm..tablets, has proven to be a mistake with every single chip generation. Stop it, Nvidia! You need to win smartphones, not tablets, which are a dying breed already. And to do that you need low-end chips as well not just "PC-class mobile chips", otherwise you'll never get the market share you need to help you become "popular" in the mobile market. And finally Intel - oh, Intel, how I despise thee. Two main reasons why I don't want Intel to win even 5 percent of the mobile market. Short version: 1) they are anti-competitive, 2) they don't deserve it. Long version - Intel has started having quite the "monopolist culture" a while ago (at least a decade). They've learned that playing the monopolist card when in power "works" (to crush competitors and entrench themselves in the market), and they try to use it as often as they can and to the limit of the law (or even well beyond it, if no one is paying attention). Intel has almost wiped out GPU vendors from laptops through strongarming of OEMs and shady pricing tactics and, with Broadwell and Skylake having an even bigger focus on GPU performance, I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe). They also have a monopoly in CPUs for PCs and are now using the profits they get there to sell their their Atom chips below cost (a practice that's illegal in many countries, but either they aren't paying attention or Intel manages to twist that into some kind of "business deal" they are making with OEMs). That's just the anticompetitive part. The "don't deserve it" part comes from the fact that Atom sucks compared to the highest-end ARM chips, even though it's built on 22nm FinFET, and those ARM chips are built on 28nm planar (if we're to compare them at the time of market launch) - essentially a 3 year/one node and a half process advantage for Intel. So they are trying to push bad products into the market and gain market share by selling them below cost to trick some OEMs into accepting their chips. And I say "trick" because that's what it is - at best, a short term advantage of them, because if Intel would ever have even 20 percent of the mobile chip market, those same OEMs would have to pay them more than what they pay for ARM chips, because it's "Intel". So many other shady Intel practices such as tricking consumers into thinking "Celeron" chips are Celeron, when in fact they are Atom, lying about the real TDP/power values of their chips to make it seem like their PC chips are almost comparable to ARM (while being misleading about the fact that they also have much lower performance) and so on. Intel is a shady company through and through when it comes to selling its products.
sosuke 12y ago
I know relating things is very natural, but I don't feel Facebook is the new AOL at all until they offer ISP and a web browser. That is what made AOL AOL. Facebook may be many peoples main destination, but it isn't how they connect to the internet, it isn't primarily a gateway to other sites. Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook at all.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook at all. AOL didn't use to let you leave AOL. For many years it was a 100% isolated walled garden. That is what made AOL AOL many years before AOL became an ISP. They only grudgingly started adding ways of accessing internet content as the growth of the net so outpaced AOL that they had no alternative in order to keep subscribers.
  - jlgaddis 12y ago
    Indeed. And, if memory serves, when they first began providing access to the Internet they also charged extra for it (although I may very well be mixing them up with someone else).
  - jghn 12y ago
    And so began the Eternal September and the <aol> faux-tag on Usenet. I remember for a while on Usenet arguments were won by simply pointing out the other person had an @aol.com address.
- spacefight 12y ago
  "until they offer ISP" https://internet.org/ https://internet.org/ Also, in some countries such as Germany, WhatsApp serves as a virtual mobile provider. https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/whatsapp-becomes-a-virtual-carrier-in-germany-with-the-help-of-e-plus/ https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/whatsapp-becomes-a-virtual-car...
  - sek 12y ago
    It's just a marketing thing where they offer 1 gig whatsapp traffic (still a cap). It's like 1000 free minutes, nothing else. Becoming a virtual provider works with E-Plus, that's why there are very innovative ones in Germany. I use simquadrat.
sgt101 12y ago
Surely weechat is the new AOL - or does something that is only used by 800m people not count?
- vegabook 12y ago
  I unfortunately think you mean wechat and not weechat.
  - pyre 12y ago
    For reference: - https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ - http://www.wechat.com/en/ http://www.wechat.com/en/
- axotty 12y ago
  I believe the article is making these comparisons only within the context of US pop culture/history.
wallflower 12y ago
In one of the bargain-binned dot com frenzy era books, I remember an AOL executive dismissively claiming that they (AOL) could put a AOL login or logout popup ad that said "Click here to pay $19.99 for absolutely nothing" and some fraction of a fraction of their customers would buy. It cannot be ruled out that those kinds of ads won't ever come to Facebook. Ads that buy with one-click (despite Amazon's patent) and rely on partial user confusion and deception as a business model.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  I can rule it out. If Facebook did that, or even if advertisers did that and Facebook didn't kick them off, it will put the brand in serious trouble, they'll get fined, etc. This is the sort of thing small scummy businesses do where the owner can hide behind it, go bankrupt and start again. It's not something a top company would do. I am not saying big companies won't do evil things. This isn't going to be one of them. And also you don't need to confuse people into paying for nothing. You can do it with their eyes wide open. In-game purchases, for example.
rottyguy 12y ago
Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped via CD) as WAOL (pronounced - Whale). IIRC, the executable was waol.exe. Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.
- Ixiaus 12y ago
  An interesting thought, I'll bet that many companies if they had published papers or OSS for the technology they built would have advanced the state of the art today by five to ten years...
  - bresc 12y ago
    Actually a lot of the services that are now "big" existed already for a long time. I still can't believe that back in 2001 we have been building something like a german Netflix. Also my colleague who sat right next to me thought it would be a great a idea to have something like youtube for music in 2002 (Soundcloud) And he actually had a working service but he gave it up :)
    - pjc50 12y ago
      Music and video services have been entirely about the licensing, not so much the technology. Remember Napster was launched in 1999.
      - chetanahuja 12y ago
        umm... not so much. Youtube was already a roaring success with user generated videos (which included lots of dvd rips, tv captures etc. etc.) before they started engaging with hollywood on a legal basis.
        pjc50 12y ago
dksidana 12y ago
Samsung is new Nokia
- emilis_info 12y ago
  Google is new Microsoft
  - hawkice 12y ago
    Instagram is the new Flickr.
- facepalm 12y ago
  But what is the new iPhone?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Joky 12y ago
    The 6? ;)
- SSLy 12y ago
  Nokia's still standing strong with quite good profit, just not in the market people used to.
chevas 12y ago
Dvorak said the same thing...in 2010 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp
- pcurve 12y ago
  or 2007 apparently. http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol
- droidist2 12y ago
  Dvorak says a lot of things though. He said the iPhone was going to bomb.
allendoerfer 12y ago
I think Facebook is well aware, that it could be over tomorrow, that is why they will survive. AOL tried to grow, I think Facebook acts more reasonable. They know the others can not get them in the social network space, no matter how hard they try, if they just secure their market share with acquisitions and slowly increase profitability. They do not try to win in another domain as the new Microsoft, Google does. In the end Amazon will win. Most of the others make their money by advertising or by selling technology to companies, which make their money with ecommerce or advertising. Amazon owns every part of this stack, which actually makes money. The bigger the Amazon brand grows, the less money will be left for the others. At the moment, this is not visible, because the whole market grows. Amazon knows this and just reinvests and waits.
- ldng 12y ago
  That is if Alibaba don't eat them for lunch.
- Chronic30 12y ago
  Last time I checked Amazon's hardware line... didn't go too well. Amazon is a retail company, not a software company. Remember that. AWS (the closest thing to software Amazon owns) will converge to 0 profitably as competitors copy the easily replicable service.
  - mpdehaan2 12y ago
    AWS as a service is providing a great deal many more services at a much faster rate than much of their competition, they basically own public cloud. They were also first to jump the gun with stuff like ECS and are doing some interesting things around RDS with Aurora. I feel AWS will only become even more dominant. This is not to say there are some advantages in a few others (say, Rackspace appears to be simple to grasp, excellent human support) and GCE (load balancers don't need to be pre-warmed, etc). But if anything, I see it increasingly harder for the other providers to keep parity with Amazon, because of their velocity and market share. Now, for many people using cloud as just a easy way to get IP addresses, it's all the same, but once you start using a lot more of their services, they provide a lot of good stuff in what is basically "middleware" for applications to latch onto. The question is whether an organization is doing this themselves (i.e. run their own Foo on their nodes) or is using the value added services or not.
Animats 12y ago
Facebook is the new Myspace. Same basic concept. Same growth in ad density over time. Same decline in customer experience. AOL is still a dial-up ISP, with 2 million customers still paying $20.48 a month. That's where their profit comes from. Their new junk-content business turned out not to generate much profit. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/07/aol-still-makes-most-of-its-money-off-millions-of-dial-up-subscribers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/07...)
- erehweb 12y ago
  As your link states, most of AOL's revenue in fact comes from content. Most of the profit comes from dial-up.
  - Animats 12y ago
    Fixed.
rokhayakebe 12y ago
Not sure what Google is but I still see most people do this: Me: Yeah, go to xyzx.com Them: Google.com ENTER -> XYXZ.com -> Click on first result
- jghn 12y ago
  I see people do this from time to time and I've never understood it.
  - jbp 12y ago
    One more reason I do sometimes this because I remember the website but don't quite remember the domain (was it .com or .net or .org)
    - jghn 12y ago
      I do understand that, but the poster specifically said typing "xyzx.com", not "xyzx" - and I definitely see people doing that
      - rokhayakebe 12y ago
        Yup. I have a friend who goes to Google, types "facebook.com," then proceeds. I mean the whole facebook.com
  - endemic 12y ago
    Obligatory: http://lmgtfy.com/ http://lmgtfy.com/
  - greenjellybean 12y ago
    I do this and the biggest reason is to avoid mis-typing and hitting a phishing site.
    - jghn 12y ago
      Interesting, and fair point. I tend to type things explicitly for the opposite reason, because I trust my fingers more than some obfuscated typo in an URL - but I see logic on both sides. OTOH normally when I ask the people I see doing this why, their answer is more along the lines of "dunno" :)
jcfrei 12y ago
I think it will be different for VR this time around. Probably not in 2015, but after that...
- serge2k 12y ago
  I think we are hitting the point where the technology is there, even if it is a bit rough. Unfortunately it is still bleeding edge, and it seems like adoption will take a while.
- robertfw 12y ago
  I agree. We may not even be seeing the Rift CV1 until much later this year. Who knows what the experience on that will be like - DK2 is close but not quite there.
sidcool 12y ago
Interesting Generalization. I contest that Facebook is in a much better situation and condition than AOL.

202 points by r0h1n 12y ago

In regards to Qualcomm dominance, thankfully there is no total domination yet - especially in the lower/midrange segment, where there is MediaTek (heh, and MediaTek is the 4th largest IC designer worldwide). And actually, I prefer MediaTek phones - you can root every single one of them and in contrast to other phone manufacturers, their preloader (first stage bootloader) even allows reading back the entire ROM. No restrictions. (For the interested, google for spFlashTool)

vidarh 12y ago
My 3 last phones have been MTK. The price/performance is much better in my opinion than most of the alternatives. Of course I won't get top range phones, but I'd rather get a new MTK based phone on a more rapid update schedule, and recently there's been some very high quality phones coming out (e.g. aluminium casing, gorilla glass and very high quality full hd displays) using MTK chips. My one caveat with them have been the dreaded weak GPS, but I don't need GPS much, and with my last phone that works fine too anyway (but anyone considering MTK based phones: if you need GPS, read reviews; on some it works fine, on others it requires some light modding, and on some it's practically impossible to get the GPS working without sacrifices to elder gods and lots of swearing).
- mschuster91 12y ago
  Mediatek even seems to supply the entire software stack for the phones - and the hardware design part... well, just google for "gongkai" (http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107). No surprise that the speed of innovation with Mediatek chipsets is far bigger than the behemoths (Samsung)
  - OvidNaso 12y ago
    That user interface on the "gonkai" really looks like Rockbox(http://www.rockbox.org/ http://www.rockbox.org/).
higherpurpose 12y ago
I agree. Qualcomm is dominant, but not quite "Intel-dominant" in mobile, especially when Apple makes another few hundred millions chips of its own. That said, it's becoming increasingly worrisome that so many OEMs just "default to Qualcomm" these days. If I were Samsung's CEO I'd put much stronger focus on making my own chips and putting them in my own devices (just like Apple), while also selling them to others, just like they sell their Super AMOLED displays and so on. I would also buy out AMD, mostly for their GPU expertise, but also to enter in the server/data-center market, which is more profitable than the mobile market. Samsung has the money and marketing clout to do much bigger things than AMD can do right now alone. I don't know what the hell Nvidia is doing in mobile, but they always seem to screw something up. Their non-focus on energy efficiency in "mobile" and their focus on "performance" for umm..tablets, has proven to be a mistake with every single chip generation. Stop it, Nvidia! You need to win smartphones, not tablets, which are a dying breed already. And to do that you need low-end chips as well not just "PC-class mobile chips", otherwise you'll never get the market share you need to help you become "popular" in the mobile market. And finally Intel - oh, Intel, how I despise thee. Two main reasons why I don't want Intel to win even 5 percent of the mobile market. Short version: 1) they are anti-competitive, 2) they don't deserve it. Long version - Intel has started having quite the "monopolist culture" a while ago (at least a decade). They've learned that playing the monopolist card when in power "works" (to crush competitors and entrench themselves in the market), and they try to use it as often as they can and to the limit of the law (or even well beyond it, if no one is paying attention). Intel has almost wiped out GPU vendors from laptops through strongarming of OEMs and shady pricing tactics and, with Broadwell and Skylake having an even bigger focus on GPU performance, I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe). They also have a monopoly in CPUs for PCs and are now using the profits they get there to sell their their Atom chips below cost (a practice that's illegal in many countries, but either they aren't paying attention or Intel manages to twist that into some kind of "business deal" they are making with OEMs). That's just the anticompetitive part. The "don't deserve it" part comes from the fact that Atom sucks compared to the highest-end ARM chips, even though it's built on 22nm FinFET, and those ARM chips are built on 28nm planar (if we're to compare them at the time of market launch) - essentially a 3 year/one node and a half process advantage for Intel. So they are trying to push bad products into the market and gain market share by selling them below cost to trick some OEMs into accepting their chips. And I say "trick" because that's what it is - at best, a short term advantage of them, because if Intel would ever have even 20 percent of the mobile chip market, those same OEMs would have to pay them more than what they pay for ARM chips, because it's "Intel". So many other shady Intel practices such as tricking consumers into thinking "Celeron" chips are Celeron, when in fact they are Atom, lying about the real TDP/power values of their chips to make it seem like their PC chips are almost comparable to ARM (while being misleading about the fact that they also have much lower performance) and so on. Intel is a shady company through and through when it comes to selling its products.

sosuke 12y ago

I know relating things is very natural, but I don't feel Facebook is the new AOL at all until they offer ISP and a web browser. That is what made AOL AOL. Facebook may be many peoples main destination, but it isn't how they connect to the internet, it isn't primarily a gateway to other sites. Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook at all.

vidarh 12y ago
> Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook at all. AOL didn't use to let you leave AOL. For many years it was a 100% isolated walled garden. That is what made AOL AOL many years before AOL became an ISP. They only grudgingly started adding ways of accessing internet content as the growth of the net so outpaced AOL that they had no alternative in order to keep subscribers.
- jlgaddis 12y ago
  Indeed. And, if memory serves, when they first began providing access to the Internet they also charged extra for it (although I may very well be mixing them up with someone else).
- jghn 12y ago
  And so began the Eternal September and the <aol> faux-tag on Usenet. I remember for a while on Usenet arguments were won by simply pointing out the other person had an @aol.com address.
spacefight 12y ago
"until they offer ISP" https://internet.org/ https://internet.org/ Also, in some countries such as Germany, WhatsApp serves as a virtual mobile provider. https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/whatsapp-becomes-a-virtual-carrier-in-germany-with-the-help-of-e-plus/ https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/whatsapp-becomes-a-virtual-car...
- sek 12y ago
  It's just a marketing thing where they offer 1 gig whatsapp traffic (still a cap). It's like 1000 free minutes, nothing else. Becoming a virtual provider works with E-Plus, that's why there are very innovative ones in Germany. I use simquadrat.

sgt101 12y ago

Surely weechat is the new AOL - or does something that is only used by 800m people not count?

vegabook 12y ago
I unfortunately think you mean wechat and not weechat.
- pyre 12y ago
  For reference: - https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ - http://www.wechat.com/en/ http://www.wechat.com/en/
axotty 12y ago
I believe the article is making these comparisons only within the context of US pop culture/history.

wallflower 12y ago

In one of the bargain-binned dot com frenzy era books, I remember an AOL executive dismissively claiming that they (AOL) could put a AOL login or logout popup ad that said "Click here to pay $19.99 for absolutely nothing" and some fraction of a fraction of their customers would buy. It cannot be ruled out that those kinds of ads won't ever come to Facebook. Ads that buy with one-click (despite Amazon's patent) and rely on partial user confusion and deception as a business model.

bbcbasic 12y ago
I can rule it out. If Facebook did that, or even if advertisers did that and Facebook didn't kick them off, it will put the brand in serious trouble, they'll get fined, etc. This is the sort of thing small scummy businesses do where the owner can hide behind it, go bankrupt and start again. It's not something a top company would do. I am not saying big companies won't do evil things. This isn't going to be one of them. And also you don't need to confuse people into paying for nothing. You can do it with their eyes wide open. In-game purchases, for example.

rottyguy 12y ago

Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped via CD) as WAOL (pronounced - Whale). IIRC, the executable was waol.exe. Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.

Ixiaus 12y ago
An interesting thought, I'll bet that many companies if they had published papers or OSS for the technology they built would have advanced the state of the art today by five to ten years...
- bresc 12y ago
  Actually a lot of the services that are now "big" existed already for a long time. I still can't believe that back in 2001 we have been building something like a german Netflix. Also my colleague who sat right next to me thought it would be a great a idea to have something like youtube for music in 2002 (Soundcloud) And he actually had a working service but he gave it up :)
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Music and video services have been entirely about the licensing, not so much the technology. Remember Napster was launched in 1999.
    - chetanahuja 12y ago
      umm... not so much. Youtube was already a roaring success with user generated videos (which included lots of dvd rips, tv captures etc. etc.) before they started engaging with hollywood on a legal basis.
      - pjc50 12y ago

dksidana 12y ago

Samsung is new Nokia

emilis_info 12y ago
Google is new Microsoft
- hawkice 12y ago
  Instagram is the new Flickr.
facepalm 12y ago
But what is the new iPhone?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Joky 12y ago
  The 6? ;)
SSLy 12y ago
Nokia's still standing strong with quite good profit, just not in the market people used to.

chevas 12y ago

Dvorak said the same thing...in 2010 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp

pcurve 12y ago
or 2007 apparently. http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol
droidist2 12y ago
Dvorak says a lot of things though. He said the iPhone was going to bomb.

allendoerfer 12y ago

I think Facebook is well aware, that it could be over tomorrow, that is why they will survive. AOL tried to grow, I think Facebook acts more reasonable. They know the others can not get them in the social network space, no matter how hard they try, if they just secure their market share with acquisitions and slowly increase profitability. They do not try to win in another domain as the new Microsoft, Google does. In the end Amazon will win. Most of the others make their money by advertising or by selling technology to companies, which make their money with ecommerce or advertising. Amazon owns every part of this stack, which actually makes money. The bigger the Amazon brand grows, the less money will be left for the others. At the moment, this is not visible, because the whole market grows. Amazon knows this and just reinvests and waits.

ldng 12y ago
That is if Alibaba don't eat them for lunch.
Chronic30 12y ago
Last time I checked Amazon's hardware line... didn't go too well. Amazon is a retail company, not a software company. Remember that. AWS (the closest thing to software Amazon owns) will converge to 0 profitably as competitors copy the easily replicable service.
- mpdehaan2 12y ago
  AWS as a service is providing a great deal many more services at a much faster rate than much of their competition, they basically own public cloud. They were also first to jump the gun with stuff like ECS and are doing some interesting things around RDS with Aurora. I feel AWS will only become even more dominant. This is not to say there are some advantages in a few others (say, Rackspace appears to be simple to grasp, excellent human support) and GCE (load balancers don't need to be pre-warmed, etc). But if anything, I see it increasingly harder for the other providers to keep parity with Amazon, because of their velocity and market share. Now, for many people using cloud as just a easy way to get IP addresses, it's all the same, but once you start using a lot more of their services, they provide a lot of good stuff in what is basically "middleware" for applications to latch onto. The question is whether an organization is doing this themselves (i.e. run their own Foo on their nodes) or is using the value added services or not.

Animats 12y ago

Facebook is the new Myspace. Same basic concept. Same growth in ad density over time. Same decline in customer experience. AOL is still a dial-up ISP, with 2 million customers still paying $20.48 a month. That's where their profit comes from. Their new junk-content business turned out not to generate much profit. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/07/aol-still-makes-most-of-its-money-off-millions-of-dial-up-subscribers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/07...)

erehweb 12y ago
As your link states, most of AOL's revenue in fact comes from content. Most of the profit comes from dial-up.
- Animats 12y ago
  Fixed.

rokhayakebe 12y ago

Not sure what Google is but I still see most people do this: Me: Yeah, go to xyzx.com Them: Google.com ENTER -> XYXZ.com -> Click on first result

jghn 12y ago
I see people do this from time to time and I've never understood it.
- jbp 12y ago
  One more reason I do sometimes this because I remember the website but don't quite remember the domain (was it .com or .net or .org)
  - jghn 12y ago
    I do understand that, but the poster specifically said typing "xyzx.com", not "xyzx" - and I definitely see people doing that
    - rokhayakebe 12y ago
      Yup. I have a friend who goes to Google, types "facebook.com," then proceeds. I mean the whole facebook.com
- endemic 12y ago
  Obligatory: http://lmgtfy.com/ http://lmgtfy.com/
- greenjellybean 12y ago
  I do this and the biggest reason is to avoid mis-typing and hitting a phishing site.
  - jghn 12y ago
    Interesting, and fair point. I tend to type things explicitly for the opposite reason, because I trust my fingers more than some obfuscated typo in an URL - but I see logic on both sides. OTOH normally when I ask the people I see doing this why, their answer is more along the lines of "dunno" :)

jcfrei 12y ago

I think it will be different for VR this time around. Probably not in 2015, but after that...

serge2k 12y ago
I think we are hitting the point where the technology is there, even if it is a bit rough. Unfortunately it is still bleeding edge, and it seems like adoption will take a while.
robertfw 12y ago
I agree. We may not even be seeing the Rift CV1 until much later this year. Who knows what the experience on that will be like - DK2 is close but not quite there.

sidcool 12y ago

Interesting Generalization. I contest that Facebook is in a much better situation and condition than AOL.