Jump to content

AOL

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Seifabdoun (talk | contribs) at 06:26, 14 February 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

MUZAIC http://muzaic.com/

America Online
Company typeJointly owned by Time Warner (95%) and Google (5%)
IndustryInternet & Communications
Founded1985
HeadquartersDulles, Virginia
Key people
Jonathan Miller, Ted Leonsis
ProductsISP
Revenue$8.7 billion USD (2004)
Number of employees
about 20,000
Websitewww.aol.com

America Online, or AOL for short, is a U.S.-based online service provider, Internet service provider, and media company. Based in Dulles, Virginia, a community in Loudoun County, Virginia, with regional branches around the world, it is by far the most successful proprietary online service, with more than 32 million subscribers at one point in the US, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Latin America (declared bankrupt in 2004), Japan and formerly Russia. In early 2005, AOL Hong Kong stopped its service. In the fall of 2004, AOL reported total subscribers had dropped to 24 million, a drop of over a quarter of its subscribers.[1] In late 1996, AOL suspended all dialup service within Russia in the face of massive billing fraud, forcing the company into a rare case of full market retreat.

For many Americans through the mid to late 1990s, AOL was the Internet, but the rise of high-speed Internet access from cable and telephone companies as well as the increasing sophistication of the public in handling browsers and other Internet utilities has cut into its user base. In 2000 AOL and Time Warner announced plans to merge, and the deal was approved by the Federal Trade Commission on January 11 2001. This merger was primarily a product of the Internet mania of the late 1990's, known as the Internet bubble. The subsequent massive decline in value of stocks such as AOL resulted in much recrimination over the merger.

News reports in the fall of 2005 indicated a renewed interest in buying out AOL. Suitors such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Comcast have had discussions with Time Warner about a possible purchase, and on December 16, 2005, Time Warner and Google announced that they were starting exclusive talks for Google to purchase $1 billion in AOL stock, a 5% share.

Although its dialup market is shrinking as more members switch to high-speed services, the success of its AOL for Broadband program has helped it to maintain members that would otherwise totally drop the AOL service. This combined with its growing advertising revenue through its relationship with Google, AOL collected 8.7 billion US dollars in revenue for 2004.

History

File:AOL.gif
The AOL logo used until late 2004

AOL began as a short-lived venture called Control Video Corporation (or CVC), founded by William von Meister. Its sole product was an online service called Gameline for the Atari 2600 video game console after von Meister's idea of buying music on demand was rejected by Warner Brothers. (Klein, 2003) Subscribers bought a modem from the company for $49.95 and paid a one-time $15 setup fee. Gameline permitted subscribers to temporarily download games and keep track of high scores, at a cost of approximately $1 an hour.

In 1983 the company nearly went bankrupt, and an investor in Control Video, Frank Caufield, had a friend of his, Jim Kimsey, brought in as a manufacturing consultant. That same year, Steve Case was hired as a part-time consultant; later on that year, he joined the company as a full-time marketing employee upon the joint recommendations of von Meister and Kimsey. Kimsey went on to become the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the newly-renamed Quantum Computer Services in 1985 after von Meister was quietly dropped from the company.

Case himself rose quickly through the ranks; Kimsey promoted him to vice-president of marketing not long after becoming CEO, and later promoted him further to executive vice-president in 1987. Kimsey soon began to groom Case to ascend to the rank of CEO when he himself retired, which Case did in 1991.

Kimsey changed the company's strategy, and in 1985 launched a sort of mega-BBS for Commodore 64 and 128 computers, originally called Quantum Link ("Q-Link" for short). In May 1988, Quantum and Apple launched AppleLink Personal Edition for Apple II and Macintosh computers. After the two companies parted ways in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online. [2], [3] In August 1988, Quantum launched PC Link, a service for IBM-compatible PCs developed in a joint venture with the Tandy Corporation.

In February 1991 AOL for DOS was launched using a GeoWorks interface followed a year later by AOL for Windows. In October 1991, Quantum changed its name to America Online. These changes coincided with growth in pay-based BBS services, like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. AOL discontinued Q-Link and PC Link in the fall of 1994.

AOL release timeline
1991 AOL for DOS launched
1993 AOL for Windows launched
1994 AOL 2.0 launched
1995 AOL 3.0 launched
1998 AOL 4.0 launched
1999 AOL 5.0 launched
2000 AOL 6.0 launched
2001 AOL 7.0 launched
2002 AOL 8.0 launched
2003 AOL 9.0 Optimized launched
2004 AOL 9.0 SE launched

Massive growth

Case drove AOL as the online service for people unfamiliar with computers, in particular contrast to CompuServe, which had long served the technical community. AOL was the first online service to require use of proprietary software, rather than a standard terminal program; as a result it was able to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of command lines, and was well ahead of the competition in emphasizing communication among members as a feature.

In particular was the Chat Room (borrowed from IRC), which allowed a large group of people with similar interests to convene and hold conversations in real time, including:

  • Private rooms — created by any user. Hold up to 27 people.
  • Conference rooms — created with permission of AOL. Hold up to 48 people and often moderated.
  • Auditoriums — created with permission of AOL. Consisted of a stage and an unlimited number of rows. What happened on the stage was viewable by everybody in the auditorium but what happened within individual rows, of up to 27 people, was viewable only by the people within those rows.

There were also text games played in the chat rooms, known as AOL chatroom game.

Under Case's guidance, AOL committed to including online games in its mix of products even when it was only a Commodore 64 service. It hosted the first Play by email game from any service Quantum Space (1989-1991); the first graphical online community (Club Caribe from LucasArts); and the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights from Stormfront Studios (1991-1997) and the first chatroom-based text role-playing game Black Bayou, a horror role-playing game from Hecklers Online and ANTAGONIST, Inc.

AOL quickly surpassed Genie, and by the mid-1990s, it passed Prodigy (which for several years allowed AOL advertising) and CompuServe.

Originally, AOL charged its users an hourly fee, but in 1996 this changed and a flat rate of $19.99 a month was charged. Within three years, AOL's userbase would grow to 10 million people. During this time, AOL connections would be flooded with users trying to get on, and many canceled thier accounts do to constant busy signals.

AOL was relatively late in providing access to the open Internet. Originally, only some Internet features were accessible through a proprietary interface but eventually it became possible to run other Internet software while logged in through AOL. They were the first online service to seamlessly integrate a web browser into content.

AOL introduced the concept of Buddy Lists, leveraging their one-on-one instant messaging technology.

Since its merger with Time Warner, the value of AOL has dropped from its $200 billion high and it has seen a similar losses among its subscription rate. It has since attempted to reposition itself as a content provider similar to companies such as Yahoo! as opposed to an Internet service provider which delivered content only to subscribers in what was termed a "walled garden.". In 2005, AOL broadcast the Live 8 concert live over the Internet, and thousands of users downloaded clips of the concert over the following months.

More recently, AOL has announced plans to offer subscribers classic television programs for free with commercials inserted. Programs available include Wonder Woman and Eight is Enough.

One of AOL's recently added premium services is AOL Talk, a VoiP Internet service.

CD-ROM distribution

See also: AOL disk collecting

AOL has tirelessly pushed itself through regularly mailing sign-up diskettes and CD-ROMs to over 100 million households, helping forge dominant growth. This campaign has been made particuarly effective by the way of these CD's offer free trials. In the early years of the AOL's practice of offering free trials with CDs, the trials where usually only a few hours. The trial time has gradually increased, and now the CD's tend to offer about a months free trial.

However this long campaign has produced a backlash, including a program called No More AOL CDs that seeks to gather one million unwanted AOL CDs and dump them at AOL headquarters. Other organizations have objected under both environmental and privacy grounds. Environmentalists say that AOL's CDs are largely unwanted and result in massive non-biodegradable plastic waste. However, AOL's mailings have never violated the law, and always interest some people. AOL has also always provided means for people to remove themselves from AOL mailing lists, though No More AOL CDs has documented claims that these removal attempts are sometimes ineffective. Others view AOL disks as valuable collectible items due to the vast number of CD-ROM design variations.

AOL users' reputation

People using AOL (often referred to as "AOLers") have a reputation online for being excessively noobish— ignorant of netiquette. This is in part due to the fact that AOL is aimed towards users who are new to the Internet. To a segment of the online population, an e-mail address ending in aol.com is a sign of ignorance, to be avoided at all costs. Some web, game, and chat servers even go as far as to ban the AOL hostmask, preventing AOL users from logging on. However, this reputation doesn't stop aol.com addresses from being widely used, even in serious business contexts; it is still commonplace in advertisements in non-computer-related publications to see lines like "See our website at www.whatever.com, or e-mail us at whatever@aol.com," to the puzzlement of those who believe an address in the company's own domain would be more logical and professional.

AOL further provoked disdain from other Internet users in 1994, when AOL began to provide access to the Usenet bulletin board system for its users. This led to a flood of relatively net-illiterate, commercial, young and immature users into what had previously been the almost exclusive domain of scientists, academics and technical personnel associated with universities and computer companies. The new AOL contingent immediately gained a reputation as pests in Usenet's numerous forums, making near-constant requests for pornography, bootlegged software and hacking information. (See: "Me too.") In early 2005, AOL ceased providing newsgroup access, instead referring customers to the Google Groups site, stating "Google does a very good job of hosting newsgroups and the typical AOL user probably doesn't use newsgroups that often."[4]

AOL e-mail accounts used to be only accessed using a nonstandard proprietary protocol not supported by other vendors' e-mail programs, compelling users, in the past, to use AOL's own mail program and be subject to its quirks and limitations. One consequence of the past practice is that when people receive e-mails from AOL users, the address, not the name of the user, is displayed, since the user's real name is not added in the manner that most other mail programs do it. In instances where the AOL user has chosen an alphanumeric alias, eg: "jwds75@aol.com" rather than "John Smith", the identity of the user is less clear to the recipient. Also in the past, users of the AOL client software were unable to click on hyperlinks in the text. Many experienced Internet users remain unaware that these inherent limitations of the AOL software are not due to any possible lack of computer skills by AOL users.

In a different vein, AOL users also have a reputation in some online communities for disruptive activities. AOL makes use of aggressive web caching proxy servers that effectively makes it impossible for a website, (such as a wiki), to block an abusive user without excluding large segments of the entire AOL community. Combined with the fact that their free service offers make it all too easy to join, many Internet trolls take advantage of this and choose AOL as a preferred means of hiding their true identity, in a manner that is almost as effective as using an anonymous proxy. This has only served to further harm the reputation of AOL users as a whole and is a large part of why some places implement a policy of banning all AOL users.

Controversies

Community Leaders

Prior to the middle of 2005, AOL used volunteers called Community Leaders, or CLs, to monitor chatrooms, message boards, and libraries. Some community leaders were recruited for content design and maintenance using a proprietary language and interface called RAINMAN, although most content maintenance was performed by partner and internal employees.

In 1999, Kelly Hallissey and Brian Williams, former Community Leaders and founders of an anti-AOL website filed a class action lawsuit against AOL citing violations of U.S. labor laws in its usage of CLs. The Department of Labor investigated but came to no conclusions, closing their investigation in 2001. In light of these events, AOL drastically began reducing the responsibilities and privileges of its volunteers in 2000. The program was eventually ended on June 8 2005. Current Community Leaders at the time were offered 12 months of credit on their accounts.

Billing disputes

AOL has faced a number of lawsuits over claims that it has been slow to stop billing people after their accounts have been cancelled, either by the company or the user. In addition, AOL changed its method of calculating used minutes in response to a class action lawsuit. Previously, AOL would add fifteen seconds to the time a user was connected to the service and round up to the next whole minute (thus, a person who used the service for 11 minutes and 46 seconds would be charged for 13 minutes). AOL claimed this was to account for sign on/sign off time, but because this practice was not made known to its customers, the lawsuit won (some also pointed out that signing on and off did not always take 15 seconds, especially when connecting via another ISP). AOL disclosed its connection time calculation methods to all of its customers and credited them with extra free hours. In addition, the AOL software would notify the user of exactly how long they were connected and how many minutes they were being charged for.

Account cancellation

In response to approximately 300 consumer complaints, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office began an inquiry of AOL’s customer service policies. The investigation revealed that the company had an elaborate system for rewarding employees who purported to retain or "save" subscribers who had called to cancel their Internet service. In many instances, such retention was done against subscribers’ wishes, or without their consent.

Under the system, consumer service personnel received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars if they could successfully dissuade or "save" half of the people who called to cancel service. For several years, AOL had instituted minimum retention or "save" percentages, which consumer representatives were expected to meet. These bonuses, and the minimum "save" rates accompanying them, had the effect of employees not honoring cancellations, or otherwise making cancellation unduly difficult for consumers.

Many consumers complained that AOL personnel ignored their demands to cancel service and stop billing.

On August 24, 2005, America Online agreed to pay $1.25 million to the state of New York and reformed its customer service procedures. Under the agreement, AOL will no longer require its customer service representatives to meet a minimum quota for customer retention in order to receive a bonus.

Software

In 2000, AOL was served with an $8 billion lawsuit alleging that its (now dated) AOL 5.0 software caused significant difficulties for users attempting to use third-party Internet service providers. The lawsuit sought damages of up to $1000 for each user that had downloaded the software cited at the time of the lawsuit. AOL later agreed to a settlement of $15 million, without admission of wrongdoing.

Usenet newsgroups

When AOL gave clients access to Usenet in 1994, they hid at least one newsgroup in standard list view: alt.aol-sucks. AOL did list the newsgroup in the alternative description view, but changed the description to "Flames and complaints about America Online".

Terms of Service (TOS)

There have been many complaints over rules that govern AOL's members conduct, call the Terms Of Service, which apply/applied to everyone who used AOL, regardless of age, or where an AOL member is on the internet. Claims are that these rules are too strict to follow, do not allow swearing, or a very flexible rule called room disruption.

Company purchases

As it grew, AOL purchased many other software companies, including:

Notable persons associated with AOL

AOL Computer Checkup

AOL Computer Checkup is a service offered by AOL to AOL members. It is a performance and hardware analyzer, not unlike the scans in Norton Utilities.

McAfee

AOL also included McAfee VirusScan and McAfee Firewall Express in some versions

See also

References

  • Klein, Alec (2003). Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-5984-X.
  • Mehta, Stephanie N. & Vogelstein, Fred (Nov. 14, 2005). "AOL: The Relaunch". Fortune, p. 84–88.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AOL&oldid=39552995"