The Small Stuff

In the beginning was the America Online Service. Certainly, this predates my existence on the Net as it does many others. From humble beginnings AOL has now turned into a multi-million member, multi-billion dollar corporation. Currently possessing about 22 million members, AOL is now, and has been for some time, a force to be reckoned with on a daily basis.

For those people who are on AOL, the Internet is often a foul looking beast. There are endless twists and turns on the web that inevitably cause everyone to eventually throw their arms up in the air and give up. Information, as accessible as it is supposed to be, is nearly impossible to find even with help from one of the many search engines or directory services. What the AOLer sees is the chaos, and they are oft rescued from that chaos by the apparently loving arms of AOL.

Tied into all of this is a proprietary program that is meant to streamline one's existence. At the click of a mouse, the AOLer is supposed to be able to check their stocks, check their email, get the weather report, and hire someone to do their dishes. If convenience is worth $21.95 per month, then I suppose we should have all signed up by now.

Here's the start of the problem: the convenience provided by such a proprietary interface may seem convenient at the start, but it locks a user down with so few options that such conveniences become almost worthless. Consider the convenience of the AOL address book. As easy (and convenient) as it is to pop one or more names into the address book, a person is limited in their usage of it. The AOL address book is not portable to any other email client, it is not printable in any useful fashion, and the information it can contain not only can't be customized, but is sparse when compared to any other address book available (including the Microsoft Address Book included with Windows 98). The "built-in" Internet Explorer browser also demonstrates the concept: conveniently placed within the AOL window, but lacking the larger, descriptive buttons on the toolbar and also lacking the ability to customize those toolbars in any way.

The service is full of these little flaws and rather large quirks. Nearly every part of the service contains these tricks that are meant to be a convenience to the user, but turn into limitations down the road. The e-mail client, news reader, and web browser have all been AOLized in this manner and all tie the user in to the service to such an extent that it becomes inconvenient to leave. That aside, most people could probably live with this under the presumption that if these are the greatest flaws of AOL, there's really not much reason to leave.

Medium sized matters

In the above commentary, I make one overarching presumption: that the service is actually working. Few people on AOL or any other service are completely unfamiliar with busy signals or occasional random disconnects. This is a common facet of dial-up life that perhaps one day, broadband will completely obsolesce. For now life goes on--except for many AOLers. When it comes to hearing tales of whoa, there is nothing more convincing than listening to an AOLer talk about bringing up the software and starting the dialer only to come back 30 minutes later to find that 20 attempts at dialing were only about half of what was needed to actually get connected to the service. The combination of seeing "Unable to get a carrier signal" combined with "The number dialed is busy" is like mixing random chemicals together in hopes to replicate the smudgy brown marks on the ceiling.

Do you need help with your AOL? First of all: good luck. You are about to brave adventurous and mysterious territory. Call after call placed to AOL's Member Services and you have likely been convinced of everything. You have been told that those blue screens of death that come up when trying to check your mail are the result of your 900 MHz Pentium III not being able to handle the download. You now know that GPF's come from clicking your mouse button too quickly, and no doubt we all know that "Unable to get a carrier signal" automatically means your modem finally felt the effects of last year's lightning storm. Wouldn't it be so much simpler if that psychic that you hired really could fix your computer?

Member Services is no better than getting support from trained zoo animals. The representatives in technical support are largely undertrained. Representatives in all departments are trained more regularly on customer service skills than on the skills necessary to help the AOL membership. Supervisors are hired for their ability to cultivate good stats from employees and often have even less knowledge about the true workings of the company (thus why speaking to a supervisor is hardly worth the effort and why most reps hand off the call to another rep who will never admit to being a supervisor because he isn't one). Billing representatives are largely unfamiliar with hard and fast billing policies, and should you ever wish to cancel your account, you are more likely to get that used-car scent drifting off your body than have any success with cancellation. Beware the rep having a bad day: he can make your life far far worse than you will ever make his.

The Big Picture

If service and support (or the lack of both) aren't enough to turn your stomach (and I will admit that both are usually a matter of experience rather than belief), perhaps some education in the AOL religion will help you out more. AOL isn't just after your money, they are after your soul. It is not enough to have 22 million pairs of eyes happily paying $21.95 every month to go about their online business. Rather, you must sit at your computer and stare at ads enticing into everything from pocket organizers to long distance service, credit cards to new computers. AOL has become the medium for a new culture of ad-addicts. Instead of being subject to a small group of ads every ten or fifteen minutes, you will now be bombarded on a minute by minute basis in ways that are impossible to stop, and extremely difficult to ignore.

That's what this merger with Time Warner is about; it is about influencing and eventually controlling how and where you spend your money and your time. Over the years AOL has gloated over the increasing amount of time that the average member spends online. Why? The fact is that the more time you spend online and the more things that you online, the greater the cost to the company unless AOL has some other agenda. In truth the longer you spend online, the more ads you see and statistically it becomes more likely that you will buy something that you see advertised. In and of itself, this might be no problem, but consider that AOL owns an increasing share of many products, many services, and indeed, a large portion of the media engine itself. As you become more reliant on AOL-Time-Warner for all your needs, it sends the death-blow to the remainder of corporate America that must either submit to AOL's terms or fold under its gigantic weight. To be clear AOL is not the next Microsoft in any way. AOL means to supercede all corporate monopolies by swallowing up a hefty majority of all goods and services while making no attempt to fully dominate any one in particular.

Seen enough? Ready to leave? Or do you still want to know more?