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Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

wsj.com

221–230 of 239 posts

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#221
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the commenter you're asking, but I've never had a constructive conversation with "those types" - the kind who go out of their way to talk about getting laid off from a tech company. Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in h…

I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead. My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a…

IMO, shorter comments much more clearly express ideas.

I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble. But I digress.

team got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them to gain control over a certain aspect of his account then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit.

A friend in middle management let slip that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy A new CTO decides to lay off almost the entire team on the only profitable account in the whole division and replace them with offshore contractors. Remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP.

Said contractors barely spoke English...

$BIGCO tried to hire back the laid off team members, but, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#222
post #69

Another former AOLer here. They tried to make a run at the broadband market in the early aughts by partnering with various telcos (I know; I was part of the team that built the back-end interface with the ISPs), but it was too little, too late. I never understood how AOL thought that would be sustainable in the long term. A few months after I left the entire billing department saw deep cuts after AOL nixed their mont…

Makes me wonder what would have happened if this acquisition was done a decade ago.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#223
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead. My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a…

IMO, shorter comments much more clearly express ideas. I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble. But I digress. team got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them to gain control over a certain aspect of his account then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to…

yeah man who the fuk has time to read two whole PAGES of words this aint social studies LMAO #yolo ☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺

can i get the sparknotes for your middlebrow hacker news dismissal i got SHIT TO DO SON 💩

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#225
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, shorter comments much more clearly express ideas. I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble. But I digress. team got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them to gain control over a certain aspect of his account then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to…

yeah man who the fuk has time to read two whole PAGES of words this aint social studies LMAO #yolo ☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺ can i get the sparknotes for your middlebrow hacker news dismissal i got SHIT TO DO SON 💩

Thank you for the whole post.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#226
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt they had any trouble seeing the decline. The question is what should they have done? 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 profi…

I think getting into essentially new businesses is exactly what companies facing the Innovator's Dilemma should generally do. The ad-driven content properties are an example of that, and they're the reason for the merger.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#227
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I read a perfect parallel: real networks employees knew their product was shit. But making it not shit would wreck the company: As employees, we weren’t proud of our business tactics, and we griped about them frequently. The topic came up at company meetings, round table conversations with executives, and through a lot of water cooler conversation over email, during lunch, and across the foosball table. One day my ma…

Great find. Of course, it's not like doing the wrong thing worked out well for them either:

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/rnwk/stock-chart?intraday=off&t...

Now they're worth maybe 10% of what they were when that guy left Real Networks.

The thing that kills me here is that they had more than two options. In the short term, sure, they're stuck. But in the long term, they could have either kept sucking or they could have worked to turn it around.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I don't even recall if they did start offering DSL. They did. My parents had it in the early 00s. They'd resell the local phone company's DSL but require you to log into the AOL app in order to actually use your connection.

> but require you to log into the AOL app

I wonder why!

Instead of being about branding or a political decision to require the user to see an AOL logo, there may have been some technical reason for it. Especially given limitations in Windows 95/98.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#229
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

how much do they pay WhatsApp each month?

"For all phone types, WhatsApp is free to download and try for the first year. After, you have the option of extending your subscription for $0.99 USD per year." from http://s831.us/1JbKMiG

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#230
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much do they pay WhatsApp each month?

"For all phone types, WhatsApp is free to download and try for the first year. After, you have the option of extending your subscription for $0.99 USD per year." from http://s831.us/1JbKMiG

except for the non-trivial part of the user base that bought the "free messages forever" version of the app...
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