techi.com — This week AOL celebrates the company?s 25 year anniversary. Throughout the internet service provider turned online advertising company?s history, they?ve been the force behind some of the most epic web-related fails known to man.
Jun 1, 2010 View in Crawl 4
arfikeJun 2, 2010
There is at least one lecture (I think it's a commencement, actually) where Warren Buffett discusses the value of brand recognition; which apparently is worth its weight in gold.He uses the example of Disney, where a parent would be in a video store with his/her unruly children, picking among a shelf of videos for the children to watch. Well, he/she *could* take the gamble with a lesser known children's movie studio that the material would be suitable and wholesome for these children to view. OR, pick the Disney film, and not have this concern. Guess which movies get picked the most by parents for their children.Brand recognition is very hard to attain and the company must be vigilant in maintaining that mental image most people have when they think of their brand. Therefore there really isn't a price you can put on that kind of value.That would be my best guess behind Time Warner's decision to merge with AOL. Damn those icebergs, they get ya every time.Let's also remember that Warner's music distribution company was the chief enforcer behind YouTube's gestapo control last year over music used in the videos like that of teenage girls making goofy videos of them singing along with certain songs just for the fun of it. Let us never forget that Warner Bros hates its customers' organic desire to have fun.
baggochipzJun 2, 2010
Yeah, they made deals with a couple telcos and cable companies to sell AOL on top of a normal "broadband" package. It was totally artificial -- telco/cable co provides the pipe like they normally do, AOL runs the same software on top of it. After all, the AOL software was nothing but a glorified version of Internet Explorer. I'm not kidding. There was no change in the product (short of a couple different widgets on the home screen; the code behind the speed tests was hilarious) and there was no integration to speak of. What I really meant was that AOL should have BEEN the service provider. Do an end-around all the telcos/cable companies. Because, as we're seeing now, all of these different communications companies are essentially competing to offer a data pipe into the home, nothing else. So, rather than having one telco and one cable company competing to be the data pipe into your home, AOL could have been a third option. A third option who's free from the decades-old, petrified infrastructure and cozy monopoly status of their would-be competitors. Had they recognized the threat/opportunity early, AOL could have been the company everybody wanted to buy broadband from. We constantly read articles about how far behind the US is in broadband penetration and speeds. Another (true) competitor in the field would have changed that. So when somebody says that AOL failing didn't affect them, I beg to differ. I postulate that had they gone in the right direction, we'd all have faster broadband speeds and lower prices today.
pimpdawgJun 2, 2010
f**k you, hipster.
wildsatchmoJun 2, 2010
Kinda like Yahoo Messenger
scootermancrJun 2, 2010
1 IM punter. Yeah, booting people of AOL back in AOL 3.0 days and before.
reconfigurJun 2, 2010
Bwahahah!
fauozJun 3, 2010
sorta like the Gov.
topher06Jun 5, 2010
How can this company still exist, seriously? Isn't it just a webpage these days?About the biggest fail of AOL was offering 1000's of free hours of use but charging up to $20/hr to access 1 800 access lines.assh**es Online, true dat.
toxicityjJun 19, 2010
someone should tell her that AOL mail went free like 5 years ago >_> I still check up on my childhood email address for kicks every now and then.