Thanks for the setup:
You could not have chosen a more salient point with which to illustrate why AOL doesn't measure up.
In July, before that famous AOL blackout, AOL was caught providing users with erroneous stock quotes.
See YOUR MONEY MATTERS, Tracking Stock Action On-Line Can Be Handy -- When It Works, WSJ July 26, 1996
An excerpt:
"And the glitches aren't always apparent, as some America Online subscribers discovered last week.
"Imagine logging on only to discover that the Nasdaq Composite Index
plummeted 9% in a matter of a few hours. The panic you feel is much like the frenzy some America Online subscribers suffered last week, when a computer problem caused the popular service to report bogus price-change data for market indexes and individual securities. The bad information was provided to subscribers for almost the entire trading day on July 16. Some subscribers say they didn't know there was a problem with the information until they read the newspapers the following day."
"Bob Cullinan, a San Rafael, Calif., subscriber was shocked when his screen reported that Premisys Communications Inc. lost 12 5/8, and Cabletron Systems Inc. was down 8. "I thought to myself, 'This is the biggest bloodbath I have ever seen. I am getting killed here and there is nothing I can do.' " In reality, Premisys was down no more than 7 1/2 on that fateful Tuesday, while Cabletron was down no more than 4 3/4 at any time during the day."
"Alarmed by similar gore, Ms. Page called her 91-year-old grandmother to alert her that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plummeted more than 300 points. It wasn't until hearing the evening news that Ms. Page's grandmother calmed down. As it turned out, the Dow average fell slightly more than half that amount before gaining back all of its losses and closing with a 9.25-point gain."
"An America Online spokeswoman acknowledged that the service was besieged by hardware problems on both Monday and Tuesday of last week."
Notice, AOL did not alert their users to the problem, they had to read about it in newspapers or find out about it on the news.
How can you rely on such a service?
The answer is obvious, you cannot.
Regards |
