341–345 of 345 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When did they switch from forcing all employees to use Yahoo Mail? When I left in 2015, they had disabled POP for internal mail, so we were forced to use the actual Yahoo Mail website.
> forced to use the actual Yahoo Mail website I left in 2016 and in practice we just didn't use email at all because it was so painful to use.
5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc. Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team. That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventua…
And third by not mobilizing it. There is no reason Whatsapp would have won if AIM went mobile app, push notifications, done. They had a huge and passionate user base, were integrated into Apple iChat, you name it. They all blew it. Goes to show that big corps often have no clue how to deal with their offerings.
Source: I worked on AIM for iPhone.
IMO AIM struggled because: - it was a highly tuned, specialized C backend, and it never migrated to something that could be improved easily. - backend technical challenges (as well as legal issues) made storing chat history very difficult - Hardly any info was collected about AIM screennames, so it was hard to build a social graph from it - AIM registration was the same as AOL signup, and that registration process was very cumbersome, imo. - Most AIM accounts had no email address associated with them, so it was impossible to do password resets, for all the locked up AIM screennames.
As a client developer on AIM, it was hard to make a material improvement to AIM, though we certainly did try
I too am sad to hear this. When I met my wife I asked her for her AIM screen name instead of her phone number. AIM was more common than cell phones (and didn't charge $0.20 per message like SMS). At the same time, I am honestly surprised it was not sunset sooner. I wonder how many active users there actually were in the end.