Hi Ross,
From the directions given on your post, I'd say the answer is clearly operator error on behalf of the present company. Having never been an AOL member, and having used the 'Net since the Mosaic days, I thought I knew a thing or two about how to manouver around a sticky home page. In one instance, I was attempting to wean a friend from AOL and get him onto the real Net via NN4.0. While on AOL I had an absolute dickens of a time trying to get access to the simplest things from the AOL home page. Like, I could not for the life of me figure out how to get www.yahoo.com/ to load. I tried to do it several ways, with no joy. I'll grant you, I did not try the IE route, alas, another TWD-determined thrust I am resisting, but in view of the fact that I have been negotiating the Web since the days when Veronica and Archie were still in the cast of characters, the impediments I ran into at the AOL front-end were nothing short of inflammatory to my sense of how this all can and should work.
What point are you making here that I'm missing ?? Your level of sophistication is certainly not matched in the general public. When you state that what one must do is minimize the AOL front end and then launch a separate browser is an action that is clearly non-intuitive and would not be picked up on by one user in a hundred. The point is that AOL intends for its front end to be sticky and is doing nothing to lessen that by (not) directing people to "open the window and then close it for the best view of the Web".
Ross, since you seem to be a defender of AOL, and we have few of them here on the Last Mile thread, perhaps you could illuminate some of the attributes of AOL that would make us take more kindly to it. In particular, I have an interest in the AOL investment in China.com, would you care to comment on the strategic fit here?
Best, Ray
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