Paul, nothing is unique about AOL's content. Any website can come up with similar content. Now people may continue to want this content, but if that's ALL they do with AOL, that changes the nature of what AOL does for a living.
In Canada, Bell's Internet service has been increasing its membership while many other ISP's have gone out of business. They too offer technical assistance for 'newbies'. The cable companies, too, might excel at this. Aside from the occasional outage, did you ever need to be an expert to get your cable working correctly?
You are right, though, MSN didn't make a go of it. That is because AOL had a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps. No one wanted to join Microsoft's 'community'. (Was price the issue? Service? I just don't know.) So...AOL may live on, because people for now feel the need for things like AOL to provide them with a 'virtual community'. However AOL is not just in the chat room business. They are charging people a monthly subscription rate for the privilege of some pretty shoddy online access and crummy customer service.
There are many online communities out there, and people will come to discover that they can belong to a lot of online communities. Maybe they'll continue to want to belong to AOL's community, and be willing to pay a fee for that. Maybe.
I remember the days of DOS, when the local computer genius would set up a handy "shell" on the computer so others could use a nice menu to start their programs without having to learn DOS commands. Thankfully, Apple and then Windows came along. We no longer need that annoying DOS shell to help us through our day. There will come a day when folks won't need those AOL training wheels anymore...not because they've become more technically proficient, but because someone else will give them the 'real deal' for the same price, or less.
The paradigm shift will come, any experienced user can feel the need for it already. Dialup access compared to the future faster connections is like loading in your software via cassette tape vs. a hard drive (remember those days?) The web is getting clogged up, the online experience is getting more frustrating as we get used to higher bandwidth applications. Pages load slowly. We get teased by news reports, and voice e-mail, and movies, and other hints of what the web 'could be' for us. But we can't have it at 56Kbs.
It won't all happen overnight, but when the change comes, it will kill AOL's reason for existing as a DIALUP service.
Why pound your head against the wall when I tell you that the online world won't always be accessed via a 28.8 dialup connection? Do you think people "needed" CD's, microwave ovens, automobiles, worprocessors that showed text WYSIWIG instead of as plain text...did they need bigger screens, higher resolution...did they need RealAudio, did they need to do their banking online....wasn't that 4800 baud modem the state of the art just a few years ago?...they don't need bigger hard drives or speakers or fax machines...why use a mouse, just use the keyboard...
But they usually end up with them.
And when ADSL or cable modem speeds are what people end up with, what is AOL? A website. Their business model is yesterday's model...as with Compuserve and Prodigy. The biggest and longest surviving dinosaur.
I remember I used to belong to those things called "BBS"'s. You'd dial up and get connected. Belong to a community. Maybe pay a fee. BBS's are yesterday's news. It's all done through the web now. It's unclear at this stage who can and cannot charge for their content, and how successful advertising-supported web providers can be.
As all the content moved off of the various proprietary doo-dads, and searching the web and sending e-mail began to follow universal standards instead of the old weird way, everyone had one thing in common. They needed an e-mail address and web access. Lucky for AOL, they provided the web access. They did a good job of providing what everyone needed to perform tasks on a global system that was becoming a universal standard.
However, what if that universal standard gets old? What if the ol' phone connections don't cut it anymore? What if people one day wake up and say...I used to like the AOL content, but all the other websites offer this free. They'll say: I used to be thick-headed enough to think that AOL was the best way of dialing up the internet, but I now realize that it is one of the worst ways. In fact, AOL is really obsolete, and overpriced.
Successful survival of advertising-supported Web services eventually depend on integrating the Web with TV's. Better quicker graphics, more comfortable 'broadcast quality' experience...from the comfort of the ol' sofa. That of course means new boxes, better surfin', and higher bandwidth.
Microsoft, TV networks, Sun, Phillips, and a whole raft of other very large companies will change the way we go online in ways that we cannot predict. But what is predictable is that your 56K connection through yer copper wire is going to look like sending mail via carrier pigeon.
I hear oldtimers say it all the time, all I want is to write a few letters and keep some recipes on this thing. That old XT will do just fine. Who needs anything new and fancy anyway? Yeah, who needs it. But the XT somehow gets replaced. Inevitably. |
