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One Year After Tearing Down The Walls, AOL Still An Also-Ran
from the free,-as-in-CDs dept
Last year, in a move that came only six years too late, AOL decided that walled gardens were out and that free web services were in. For a brief period, there was a flurry of news about AOL's attempt to reinvent itself as a Yahoo-like portal. With the walls torn down, the challenge for management was to actually give people a reason to use AOL's services, thus driving up traffic and ad revenue. Simply being free would not be enough to bring people back unless there was a compelling reason. A year later, it doesn't look like the company has accomplished this. Earnings guidance was recently reduced as the company's growth rate continues to lag behind the industry average. As Wall Street gets antsy over its performance, it seems likely that we'll hear renewed calls for Time Warner to just dump AOL and finally wash its hands of the whole affair. AOL's problem is the same one facing Yahoo: it's not Google. The difference is that Yahoo still has a lot of market share and traffic to work with. Both companies have made several acquisitions in the past year or so in an attempt to reinvent themselves, but unless one of them stumbles onto the next MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, it's unlikely that acquisitions will hold the key to a turnaround.
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AOL is still in business?
I think Dave Barry is correct in stating that half of today's landfills are AOL CDs and disposable Diapers.
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Re: AOL is still in business?
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Re: Re: AOL is still in business?
What a poetic way to say they are "Full of shit." I am impressed.
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Ugghhhh
Wonder why AOL can't make a go of it!?!?!?!? Could it be that they're such greedy, ignorant, Internet abusing morons that they can't comprehend that destroying the user experience drives results in fewer users and less page/ad views?
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Then, there is image
Sadly, I have a brother who swears by AOL, I've tried to show him the light, but that only hardened his resolve. We have a fairly computer literate family, so he is an embarrassment, we just ignore the elephant in the room.
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Re: Re: AOL is still in business?
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aol disks and garbage
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