AOL And The Open Web

If AOL has any hope of remaining a viable brand, and making a transition to the Open Web based on its efforts in social tools, then it must jettison the AOL subscription service, as I have been arguing for years. The recent flap over the hapless Vincent Ferrari's attempts to cancel his AOL subscription is like a stake in the heart of that entire dwindling business model, and best of all he recorded it (listen here):

[from AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy' by Randall Stross]

To listen as Mr. Ferrari tries to cancel his membership is to join him in a wild, horrifying descent into customer-service hell. The AOL representative, self-identified as John, sounds like a native English speaker; he refuses to comply when Mr. Ferrari asks, demands and finally pleads — over and over again — to close his account.

"By my count, he used the word 'cancel' 21 times," said Nicholas J. Graham, an AOL vice president and spokesman. "That's not counting the I-don't-need-it's, I-don't-want-it's and I-don't-use-it's. Add the other inferences, it's probably closer to 30." Mr. Graham, almost needless to say, was sharply critical of John's lack of responsiveness.

The hidden problem is some manager inside of AOL who has been incented with retaining subscribers and who has opted to make the process of defecting as annoying as possible, and who is obviously incenting telephone "support" staff on retention, as well. It's a strategic flaw, not some misguided idiot, working as outsourced labor in a prison somewhere.

The only hope for AOL is to drop the entire model, go open, and hope for the best. Otherwise, they will be trading their brand -- whatever value it still retains -- for a rapidly diminishing stream of small change and a huge backlog of illwill.

If AOL's offerings have any intrinsic value, people will opt to use them. I personally believe that AIM's value is diminished because of the desire of AOL management to couple it with the failing subscription service. But don't get me wrong, it will not be the first time that top management of a failing business will fail to read the handwriting on the wall and go on to fumble the future. Think of DEC, Xerox, Kodak, Data General, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and now AOL.

Does AOL's management see the coming battle of the instant messaging 2.0 marketplace? It's about openness, not proprietary solutions. But I have to bet against AOL, despite their leadership with AIM today. They just are not demonstrating the innovation that I see at Yahoo and Google.

So, I am going to switch off AIM, because I think I will have to do at sometime in the future anyway. I hope that Apple makes an alliance with Yahoo, so that AIM is not the only major IM network tied into the Apple IM client. (Yes, I know about the Jabber integration, but that's not an answer.)

I am downloading the new Yahoo Apple client (see a review later this weekend), and hoping for the continued innovation at Yahoo to rapidly make that client the equal (or superior) experience to that offered by Yahoo for Windows (see this post about a recent meeting at Yahoo). And I will continue to use Gchat, since the user experience inside of Gmail is so good.

I am stuck with a divided world for instant messaging, today, but I am hopeful that tomorrow's giants -- which may not include AOL -- will put aside their sectarian nonsense, and give us the interoperability that is our right. I don't accept any of their bullshit about these being private services, which we have access to only by their suffrance. The Government should deem it in the public interest to force interoperabilty on any instant messaging service that has more than some small baseline of users, like maybe 100,000. Why can't our politicians do something about this, since the mega-companies can't get it together to do it? Apparently farther-sighted politicians of earlier days took drastic steps to make the phone companies interoperate, turning AT&T into a near monopoly in 1918. Today, we manage interoperablity through operating agreements between telephone companies, and the same could hold with instant messaging.

The same sort of government ineptitude and stupidity that allows AOL to continue with the staggeringly horrible experience that Vincent Ferrari suffered is the same mindset more worried about gay marriage and flag burning than helping Americans easily communicate through the Web. Sure, I am aware there is a war on, and that we are confronted with a hundred crises, ranging from Avian flu to global warming. But if our elected leaders can take time away from pressing global concerns to meddle in the lives of citizens and picayune pork barrel projects like "bridges to nowhere" why can't they accomplish something so obviously in our collective benefit?

Probably because most of them are older and disconnected from the realities of everyday life, they aren't even aware of this. These are people who have others dial the phone for them, and still others to read and write their email. The only time they've heard of Skype is when some lobbyist representing a telco is pushing a bag of cash under the table to them, and their only concern with instant messaging is how to attack Internet vice to gain support from conservative luddites. So, I don't hold out too much hope, even from the most tech-savvy and youngest politicians, because they lack a social barometer to guide them: they appear more interested in power and petty politics than doing what's right for the country and, because of our unique position as the leader in Web culture, what's right for the future of the world.

tags: yahoo+messenger, gchat, google, apple, ichat, open+web, aol, aim, yahoo, vincent+ferrari, at&t, interoperability, instant+messaging+2.0, instant+messaging, skype, jabber,

Comments

[Aaron Brazell]

Stowe, I was with you 100% until you started into the elected offificals bit. As I see it, they have no role in this process (and rightly so). Name me one private industry where, when government became involved, it was actually a boon to the industry. Eveything I can think of ended in overly-regulated, marginally profitable companies that perform less effectively and efficiently than they could.

Again, I don't really see how your two thoughts are connected in any way. You just sound like a sour liberal, and you may be, but I don't know how it services this entry in any way. IT just sounds so tangental and disconnected.

[Stowe Boyd]

Aaron -

The example I used -- the US government stepping in to mandate interoperability of telephone systems -- is the best analogy. Other examples include regulation of air quality and related ecological issues, where the companies involved are never individually willing to expend extra costs.

I guess I do sound like a "sour liberal" but given the context we live in, what other type of liberal is there?

[Aaron Brazell]

I guess I do sound like a "sour liberal" but given the context we live in, what other type of liberal is there?

Touché. :)

[Aaron Brazell]

Oh and the bit about companies not be willing to on their own spend extra money. I'd say that the opportunity for the governmet to play a role here should be more along the lines of incentives instead of actual regulatory action. Companies never want to pay for things that don't benefit them. They've got books to balance and stockholders to earn money for. I don't personally want to buy a BMW for my neighbor, so why should I expect a company to of their own accord spend money on things that don't beenfit them. Do I post ads on my sites out of goodwill or because I have the opportunity to earn more money by doing so?

Now give companies an incentive to do so and you'll get cooperation. Tax incentices are the number one things that comes to my mind.

[Seth Wagoner]

Aaron, I can give you a good example of your government "getting involved" to the benefit of industry - every time your government goes to war, profits *soar* in the oil industry and defence industry. I know, I know, facetious example.

However, in general government regulation is not designed to help industry profits, but rather to prevent rampant profiteering detrimental to the consumer, the environment, and *other industries*.

If the government went around rewarding industry with tax incentives to stop behaving badly, as you suggest, then every industry would start behaving *worse* in the hope that the government would reward them also. Fear of regulation is more or less the only thing that prevents complete market failure in some cases. Some things in life just aren't meant to be provided by markets.

Read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure and be enlightened.

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[James Cherkoff]

When I cancelled my AOL account a couple of years ago they just ignored my request and kept on billing me. As I wasn't using the service and had told them i didn't want it any more, I ignored the invoices. They were then sent to a debt collection agency which started making very aggressive noises. After many, many phone calls and threat of legal action on my part - the dogs were called off and that was the end of my AOL experience - for ever.

[jeremy]

Why is jabber not a solution? It integrates with Google's gchat nicely and has much to reccomend it for the future of interoperability given it's standing as an ietf standard.

[markdaycomedy]

And now... the inevitable video parody...

Cancel my Playboy account

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbjUnz64ywc