Showing posts with label Modems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Modems. Show all posts

March 27, 2011

AOL DNR




With all due respect to the greatness that AOL once was, enough is enough with their fledgling attempts to reinvent themselves.

OMG, the time has come, do not resuscitate (DNR) as AOL anymore.

Bloomberg Businessweek (March 28-April 3, 2011) reports "AOL Tries for Something New: Silicon Valley Cred...a new Palo Alto workspace."

Aside from the new digs, AOL has put a long-whiteboard along the hallway with the phase "AOL is cool."

But as the article says "Nothing is less cool than professing one's coolness, of course, especially if you're an Internet dinosaur evoking a bygone era of dial-up modems."

AOL was one of the hottest tech stocks in the 1990s, only to go down in one of the worst mergers in history to Time Warner.
AOL's market capitalization peaked in December 1999 at $222 billion and now is at $2 billion.

In 2002, AOL Time Warner was forced to write-off goodwill of $99 billion--at the time, the largest loss ever reported by a company.

Let's face it, AOL is not the same company it once was--it has become a shadow of its former self.

And it is flailing, trying desperately to reinvent itself, most recently with its purchase of The Huffington Post.

In my mind, one of the big problems is that rather than recognize that AOL is over, dead, kaput, and that it taints whatever it touches, it just keeps reaching out to more and more victims.

AOL needs to shut down as its former self and restart under a new name with a new identity for the new technology world it is entering a decade later!

If it really wants to "expunge the ghosts and start fresh" then it needs to relinquish the past including the AOL moniker and become a new company for a new age.

Dial up modems are long gone and not missed, thank you.

(Source Graphic: Wikipedia)

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