True, AOL does have a shot because they own content. I don't know though, AOLs user base comes from the ignorant. People who don't know anything else start with them and are afraid to change.
However if you really want to talk content, your talking Hotline. I thought it was facinating that media companies went after all the other file sharing Apps, except Hotline. They can't touch Hotline because the central directory is not run by Hotline. They NEVER mention Hotline because they don't want anyone to know about it. iE won't automatically enter hotlingHQ in the Address line, no matter how many times one visits. Hotline is the great underground App that no one wants to talk about. It owns file sharing among the knowledgeable and it could become a household word, but it hasn't. You can get movies there BEFORE they come out. Content just hasn't meant power on the net so far.
AOL has a different paradigm and is a question mark. I think AOL holds consumers with content, but it doesn't get consumers with content. I was reading an article about how disjointed they are now that the Time Warner merger took effect. One AOL exec they quoted described them as a "Huge ship without a rudder". They've been including iExplorer in their packages for years, but they now plan to include Netscape 6. Consumers who use AOL probably won't compare Netscape 6 to iE so they'll never know how crappy it is.
So AOL is a wild card, but I think if I had to bet on one of the two I'd put my money on Microsoft.
I never said I thought Microsoft was going to win everything. My original comment was that Microsoft has declared that they're going to concentrate on security and I think they'll do it and be reasonably successful. They'll make security their mantra, we'll all hear about it constantly, the ignorant will come to believe it, just like Goebels(?) said "repeat anything enough and they'll believe it". But Microsoft will slowly make their products more and more secure and reach a level of reasonable if not total security. |
