I’ve disliked AOL ever since doing some work for them. Nothing against the company, I wasn’t there long enough to get any sense of the place – I was just freelancing and I have a feeling I was actually freelancing for some other firm, probably BBC, and working with AOL on their behalf.
But I did have to create some AOL pages and that was enough.
It was stupidly awkward, just a true pain and you ended up making every page look the same because you only have so many days of life left in your body.
Then around that time someone bought AOL – was it Time Warner? my mind’s gone – and the story was that this corporation mandated that all employees switch to AOL email. And then quietly stopped mandating when they found that it was so bad.
But AOL and CompuServe were once what the internet is today and if it isn’t true that everybody used them, it might as well have been true. Just as today if it isn’t true that everybody has fled AOL and CompuServe, it ought to be true.
The only advantage to staying on AOL is that you get to keep your @aol.com email address and for some people it’s worth the hassle to keep that.
What I didn’t realise was just how many people that is. I mean, seriously. It’s a lot. Enough that people who pay to just keep their email address is adding up to $143m US (£85m UK).
We’re in the wrong business.