211–220 of 239 posts
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How much does your average TV viewer pay NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox per month?
That is an unfair analogy. Those networks make money from advertising. WhatsApp refuses to show ads.
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>> They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering. None of the big ISP's from the 90's "made it". Earthlink, Netcom, Prodigy... They were all either acquired, went bankrupt, or became DSL resellers. They didn't have any content so they were worthless as broadband took over. There's only a handful of dot-com's still around from those…
> None of the big ISP's from the 90's "made it". AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are still chugging along, among others. Some of them aren't household names like Level 3 or CenturyLink. > There truly was nothing they could have done. It's 1996, sales are terrible, stock price is in the toilet, the newest product line isn't selling as well, and it was very expensive to develop as it moved to a different CPU architecture. M…
To reinforce your point, Earthlink did jump into the DSL market early and they're still chugging along.
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Recently, a woman that I shared an elevator with commented on my laptop - she noticed that I worked at a large tech company. She commented that she too had worked for a large tech company at one time - AOL. I smiled. She then immediately recounted the day she and her entire floor were laid off unceremoniously. Luckily, that was about the time that we reached her floor.
I too worked for AOL at one time, after they bought Netscape who happened to be my employer at the time. I very quickly took a severance option they were offering. There were also plenty of developers that fell under the iPlanet umbrella working for Sun/Netscape that later felt the axe. Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins.
Wow, I just discovered Wikipedia has no page for Sprynet. Now just who do I contact about getting that edited?
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I too worked for AOL at one time, after they bought Netscape who happened to be my employer at the time. I very quickly took a severance option they were offering. There were also plenty of developers that fell under the iPlanet umbrella working for Sun/Netscape that later felt the axe. Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins.
AOL was briefly on my paystubs for awhile as well. My first tech job was at Sprynet in the mid 90's, when it was first owned by Compuserve, then Worldcom, then AOL, then Mindspring (when I finally got out,) and shortly after, Earthlink. Wow, I just discovered Wikipedia has no page for Sprynet. Now just who do I contact about getting that edited?
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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…
> you paid something like $20/mo for 15 hours (it's been a long time) I don't think it was that much, because when AOL first came out with their "$20/month unlimited plan" (years after the regular ISPs did), I remember thinking "this is great for people like me, but I kinda feel bad for people who only use their connection for an hour a week". I think it was more like $7/month for your X free hours (and I remember th…
http://www.forevergeek.com/2007/04/what_did_online_access_co...
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WhatsApp has about a quarter of a billion (with a 'B') users worldwide.
how much do they pay WhatsApp each month?
To give you some perspective. When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.
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They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering. They failed to do all of the above, and are now in the dustbin of history (and to me, are solely remembered for their acquisition of nullsoft who then created Gnutella - predecessor of P2P file sharing services).
I think they are a great Innovator's Dilemma example. Quarter to quarter and manager by manager they could always do better denying the coming reality. I'd bet there were plenty of people within AOL who knew they were fucked in the long term, and I'm sure some of those actually tried to change things. But it's extremely hard to do anything that threatens existing revenue streams. Eventually the innovative people leav…
Competing directly with cable companies in wiring up homes for broadband is a mug's game. This was before it was reasonable to do with fiber and they didn't have anything like Google's freighters full of cash.
So they rode it down. That was probably the right thing to do - their dial up business is still there and still profitable. They have some viable properties on the content side, which is about the best you could have expected without having them get into an entirely new business (like search).
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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.