I saw this article on Business Week Online this morning. AOL's latest strategy of giving away content for free and acting more like a regular Internet portal such as Yahoo! is what I have always felt it should have done all along. As Internet users continue to move to broadband, what AOL refers to as "the client" (ie AOL 8.0, AOL 9.0) will become less and less relevant to their everyday use and AOL needs to abandon its "walled garden" strategy and embrace the "always on" environment.
I hope it pays off. I wrote about AOL in one of my Darden essays, saying that I have been a member since 1996 and I am very fond of the service but it's been painful working at AOL over the last three years and having to watch management make decisions that resulted in the eventual withering away of the AOL brand. When I went down to Kenan-Flagler in April for its Accepted Student Weekend, I signed up for different clubs during the activities fair - I noticed that everyone on the sign-up sheets had either a Gmail or Hotmail address and I was the only one with an AOL email address.
In addition to the strategy outlined in the BWO article, there are several products that AOL is working on that cater toward the "always on" audience that I think are pretty cool. But what concerns me is that the creativity factor is no longer at this company. Some of my co-workers were telling me at lunch yesterday that Gmail has several features where you can slightly alter your email address and the email will still go to your mailbox. For example, if you are OneCoolDude@gmail.com, you can add dots anywhere on your email address, One.Cool.Dude@gmail.com for example, and the email will still get to you. Another thing you can do with Gmail is the "plus feature." In the example above, any email sent to OneCoolDude+newsletter@gmail.com will also go to the same mailbox. This is a great feature for if you want to subscribe to mailing lists and you want to track to see whether any organization shares your email address without your approval. As an AOL member, I am still waiting for the day when AOL comes out with the next creative idea that has the "wow" factor.
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2 comments:
Gmail rules! Google Rules! (Google..please hire me)
I'm not sure AOL was ever creative...unless you consider their attempts at customer retention. I think I must have only paid for about 1/4 of the months I ever used AOL. I only used it to dial-up for the summers between undergrad years. I would sign up, cancel, have them offer me two free months, and cancel for good at the end of the summer. I think at K-F you should definitely not use AOL any longer...you'll have a new email address that is going to be your main point of contact for getting stuff done while you are there. And like you pointed out, you'll be the only person using it at school. While that is not bad in and of itself, you need to understand that people make assumptions about AOL users...at least users below the age of 75. I just hope that AOL is finally jettisoned by Time Warner and the consensus-worst merger ever will finally be unwound. AOL's pumped up stock and Steve Case's misguided ideas were never sustainable from the start. PS-when AOL finally is spun off, get shares of Time Warner and avoid AOL like the plague. AOL will eventually be bought for a few million $ by some spammer looking for a list of email addresses...I think it's super you are pulling the chute and going on to bigger and better things, but what do I know, I actually spent the time to post on a blog :)
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