Whither AOL?
Oct. 7, 1997 -- The headline that appeared recently on
many computer screens in the Boston area was enough to give anyone pause.
"VICIOUS MURDERS: Death Penalty Time?" it asked. Then it added
incongruously, "HUB THEATER GUY: Answers your mail."
Many people undoubtedly wondered: What does the "HUB THEATER
GUY" answering e-mail have to do with "VICIOUS MURDERS". Theater critics
are a mean bunch, but they're not quite that mean.
The answer is that this was just another day on American Online. The
giant online service seems to have become a center of some of the most tasteless
treatments of news stories imaginable, which get incongruously mixed together with
marketing efforts and genuine news. Here, a sensational crime headline got seamlessly
blended in with a tease for the theater columnist. In other instances it is references to
sports or political events that get stuck together with headlines for stories about
gruesome crimes or public scandals.
Here's another one from America Online: "PREDICT SCORE! Patriots
will win by? NEWS: Alleged killer filmed dope promo." A third, about a young victim,
was too insensitive to use even as an example.
America Online offers its members a steady stream of this stuff,
constantly conveying the sense that malevolence and human suffering are just another part
of the fun of online life. The routine use of capital letters and exclamation points, the
invitations to members to post messages on the guilt or innocence of people in the news,
and the focus on extreme situations, leave one with the impression that AOL is engaged in
the online equivalent of hyperventilation. Nuance, thy name is not AOL.
But the cavalier treatment of real events is only one of a legion of
problems that afflict America's most controversial Internet service. Another is the fact
that it tells members virtually nothing about itself and the issues surrounding its
service. While Internet news sources frequently buzz with controversies involving AOL, the
online service itself usually reveals news about itself only when it has no choice. And
what it does say is so full of indirection and missing information, it reads like an army
of attorneys and publicists agonized over every word, before releasing it to the public.
Meanwhile, one of the things AOL does offer are marketing ploys
disguised as forms of customer service. There are all those efforts to tell members how to
protect their computers, for example, which always seem to turn out to be promos for Dr.
Solomon's Anti-Virus software. Also as part of its marketing efforts, it besieges members
with full-screen advertisements that interpose themselves between users and the pages they
are trying to get to. The ads can be turned off, but many people don't know that.
AOL has other problems, as well. While the Internet sizzles with hot
graphics, for example, its graphic interface is dull and washed out, with content located
in only a window in the center of the screen. And despite improvements, it often fails to
create pages that are clearly labeled. It still hasn't figured out, for example, that if
you offer readers a link to some feature, the link should actually go to the feature,
instead of going to other sets of links that may eventually lead to where readers thought
they were going.
Many people, by now, know how the company has managed to succeed so far,
despite its shortcomings. The answer is that it made an appearance early in the history of
this industry; it blanketed the country with diskettes and CDs to connect people to the
service, and it benefited from the fact that many people had no idea where else to go. And
it has managed to package news, chat, an Internet connection, and other services
successfully enough to have something of value to offer customers.
When you add all this up, it is obvious that it has been primarily
marketing-driven and only very secondarily customer-service-driven, which has been the
secret of its success and the cause of its problems. The overall sense is of a company
with an exploitive attitude toward its customers, a sense that is heightened by recent
revelations that AOL reserves the right to keep a record of where members go on the
Internet. Unfortunately, many members are unaware of this invasion of privacy, as they are
about many other important things having to do with the online service.
But, today, things are beginning to change, as the developments sweeping
the rest of the Internet force AOL to take notice. You see, AOL has figured out that the
money is in being a content and service provider. The future is in information, not
hardware. So AOL is now focusing on the formula it made successful in which it is a
creator and compiler of content and links, and a provider of services like chat rooms.
The problem is that everyone and his brother-in-law out on the Internet
is also becoming a provider and compiler of content and links, and a provider of services
like chat rooms. The reason is obvious: if you get people to come to your site, you can
charge the most for your advertising space.
CNET, for example, is one of the web's two primary computer news
services, but it is now providing a page called Snap! Online, a brighter and more timely
version of AOL's main page, full of content, news sources, and links, which are being used
by many Internet Service Providers as a start page for customers. Similarly, Internet
Explorer 4 is a browser but the browser now offers channels that can take content from
major sites right to your desk top. It also offers various ways to display links so you
can have it all laid out like a virtual buffet. When you put IE4 and Snap! together, as
many are doing, you've got something that is a pretty good facsimile of an online service,
with live content and good graphics. With these and other similar efforts, suddenly many
AOL customers will know where else to go.
Ah, but AOL offers chat (all-too-often, mind-numbingly boring chat --
but that's another story.) And chat has been one of its strengths. But Snap! offers chat. Yahoo!
is an index of sites, but it offers chat. Heck, the convenience store down the street will
be offering chat in a year. So much for chat.
Ah, but AOL offers numerous channels of its own content. Yes, and
traveling through many of them has been like exploring the lost areas of the city in the
movie Logan's Run. Much of it has been dead content that just seems to be hanging
around the basement of cyberspace.
Ah, but AOL offers a browser, based on Internet Explorer 3. But the
browser interface really isn't as good as the original IE3. And if you try to go out onto
the Internet with IE3 itself, (or with IE4), AOL counts you as inactive and keeps trying
to disconnect you. The only way to stop it from trying to disconnect you is to keep
calling up AOL's interface and clicking its own links, to fool AOL into thinking you're
active, when in fact you really are active but it refuses to acknowledge it.
So AOL's problem is that what it offers people is only of mediocre
quality, by today's standards, and it really doesn't understand how to hold on to customer
loyalty. And it is now becoming possible for people to find the same or better services,
at no cost, no matter who their Internet Service Provider is, as much of the Internet
begins to offer a more structured experience that is more like newspapers and television.
AOL is responding by rolling out what Chairman and CEO Steve Case refers
to in a recent message as 'The Next AOL," which will be "a series of initiatives
designed to make using AOL even easier, more useful and more fun." It involves
improving existing channels of information and offering new channels that will be
constantly updated to make things more dynamic and timely. AOL is also upgrading the
browser, and so on.
It might work. AOL could find a way to boost itself up once again. But
if that is to happen, it is going to have to start looking and acting like the best of the
web or else come up with something unique that works. If it sticks to anything like the
current model of service, it could begin to experience a rush of customers heading toward
Snap!, and other parts still unknown.
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