Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 239 posts

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#181

Post by itsbits »

vpeters25 wrote: post #165
itsbits wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am working in AdapTV. With AOL, we didn't die but surely didn't improve...

I took a contract at this great place with highly experienced team members which had been acquired by Verizon a year before. I was assured Verizon would not mess with the great thing they had going but slowly, almost all of them got fed up with the changes and left, including our manager. It was not just our team, almost every week there would be a "bye and thanks for all the fish" email from some higher up. Just las…

Thats lil bit worrying case..But unless Verizon wants to kill of Video Ad Management Product "ONE by AOL", this may not happen here. AFAIK Verizon doesn't have anything related on this..

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#182

Post by briandh »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #122
sswaner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is referring to Verizon. Now that they are part of the Verizon family AOL can get you online via, fiber, cable or dialup.

Actually, I didn't realize AOL and Time Warner split.

Not only did AOL and Time Warner split, but Time Warner Cable is a separate company from Time Warner.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#183

Post by jerf »

temuze wrote: post #90
jmhuret wrote: post #51

$4.4 Billion is the equivalent of 7.3 Trillion free hours of AOL service via promotional cd-rom.

Assuming you get 1000 hours per CD, you're saying CDs cost about $1.65. You could probably get CDs in bulk for an order of magnitude or two cheaper. Assuming the CDs are $0.01, that's 440 trillion free hours. Great deal for Verizon.

On the other hand, with dial up at ~50kb/s, and the top-end Verizon FiOS running at 150Mb/s, that 440 trillion free hours of dialup is only 146 billion hours of FiOS, or $33/hour of FiOS 150Mb/s, or, put in the way that the market usually charges for bandwidth, approx $24,000/month for 150Mb/s bandwidth. That is way more than the going rate for that sort of bandwidth.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#184

Post by snowwrestler »

hackuser wrote: post #168

Is Verizon competing with Comcast, who bought its own media company (NBC Universal)? Are the big communications companies now competing over vertical integration? If they invest in vertical integration, that might give them a strong incentive to maximize their investments by priortizing their own media over others, degrading the open Internet.

The answers are yes, yes, and yes.

As content becomes unbundled from the wire, wire-owning companies need to become content companies if they want to avoid becoming a utility.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#185

Post by eueueu »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #127
darklajid wrote: post #58

Today I learned that WhatsApp is 5 times more valuable than AOL - and I never understood either of these companies' market.. Interesting though - that company 'felt' like a giant when I seriously got into using the web and although the article seems to imply that the operations of AOL continue (using the AOL brand?) it's fascinating to see such a company being swallowed.

WhatsApp has about a quarter of a billion (with a 'B') users worldwide.

how much do they pay WhatsApp each month?

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#186

Post by x0x0 »

billyhoffman wrote: post #180
georgeott wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They owned a closed "Walled Garden" version of the internet. Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.

Yes. This. It's a reoccurring battle that all companies that build some kind of infrastructure and offer content/data services on that infrastructure end up facing. When they built the pipes, there was no data/content, so they had to create it. But now there is so much more content/data that is so much better, and people just want to use these companies as a dumb pipe to get to the good stuff. We see it now with cell…

I think you're underestimating several things:

1 - aol was quite expensive to use: it was a long time before they introduced flat rate pricing. When I got it in the mid 90s, you paid something like $20/mo for 15 hours (it's been a long time) and then paid something like $2/hour for every hour after that. I ran up a $60 charge and then had to be much more careful about how much time I spent online. Lesson: because aol was so expensive to use, it incentivized people to use raw internet which had much less content at that time. But some local isp offered $20/mo unlimited use pricing.

2 - they basically missed the transition to broadband

Had they realized they were a content business that had to run access infrastructure out of necessity, I think they could have had a shot at owning the internet. Thankfully they messed that up.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#187

Post by snowwrestler »

pyvpx wrote: post #100
tw04 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the least bit bizarre, but it is EXACTLY what people are (or should be) afraid of. The people who own the pipes should NOT own the content, or they will be incentivized to leverage their monopoly on our computer screens to provide unfair advantages to their content. The FCC should have drawn a line in the sand and been done with it before the Comcast deal was allowed to go through (but of course the head of…

if so, then why should the pipes be privatized at all? in that case, the pipes should be built out and maintained at a governmental-level and leased back at a uniform/standardized price to all providers.

That is called municipal broadband and quite a few municipalities are looking very hard at it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chattanooga-tennessee-big-int...

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#188

Post by sliverstorm »

nly wrote: post #172
sliverstorm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that really matters all that much. It could be my limited perspective talking, but fiber seems pretty future-proof. Nothing is faster than light; the only conceivable improvement would be cables that can handle wider spectrum of light. (The nodes on the other hand, of course, are continually improving) Ethernet cable is a similar story. NICs have advanced tremendously, but Cat5 (defined in 1991) is still…

Fiber is future proof but most people don't have it. The process of getting it is called growth. If it's the case that making the "pipes" a public utility would have hindered growth, then you would never have got fiber. And 100M ethernet over Cat5e is pretty useless. Standard WiFi these days is 150-300 Mbps. I regret not running Cat6 in to my extension just to be safe.

I would run Cat6a if I was building a house, because it's the latest spec and not much more expensive, but Cat5e is still great. Standard WiFi never gets anywhere close to those speeds, is simplex, and I find a 10Mbps Ethernet (powerline) link handily outperforms a 100Mbps WiFi connection for networked file system access. (Probably either an issue with the simplex or dropped packets)

P.S. Cat5e can still do 1Gbps, just not over quite as great a distance as Cat6. Although Cat5e definitely isn't rated for 10Gbps (nor is vanilla Cat6 for that matter)

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#190

Post by sliverstorm »

janesvilleseo wrote: post #76
AwesomeGriffin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck More probably these decisions are made at a very high level and the individual abilities of these workers aren't even taken into consideration. The real lessons here are never trust your employer, loyalty is a two-way street and always have an exit plan.

Exactly. I was having this conversation with fellow employees. He brought up that they have a 1.5 - 2 year plan to phase out his entire department and moving everything overseas. I was just shocked that he was literally watching time tick by until his job was over. He was been with the company for 8 years. I asked why he stayed and it came down to security. He has kids and needs the insurance.

I hear that while it can be depressing to stay while the department is transferred overseas, companies will often sweeten the deal to make it worth your while- despite the fact they are getting rid of you, they still need the transition to happen gracefully, and to transfer knowledge to the new team.
Post reply on HN