Die sucker! Die!
Microsoft leads chase for AOL stake — Looks like Microsoft has outlasted another competitor.
According to unnamed sources quoted by the New York Times, Microsoft has emerged as the front-runner to land the stake, which Time Warner is auctioning in a bid to boost its share of the online advertising market and overall value.
A Microsoft/AOL deal would vault the combined entity to the eleventh top internet destination in the US, combining Time Warner’s 119 million users with Microsoft’s 114 million.
Does anyone really WANT AOL?! I can’t help but think that everyone is only pretending to want it to trick some poor sucker into buying it.
AOL isn’t profitable, it never really was profitable, and its market is utterly outdated. What’s going on here?!
I would hope that the feds would stop the #2 Internet provider from buying the #1 Internet provider when the #2 provider happens to be a convicted monopolist.
Say that AOL doesn’t matter all you want, but there are still more people out there on dialup than all other connection types put together, and AOL has a majority of them.
I recently did a clean install on a friend’s computer, and yeah, she was an AOL subscriber, and no, there was no way I could talk her out of it. I remember waiting until the last to install AOL, and after a fairly painless installation procedure I hit the last click and WHAMMO! The screen filled with icons galore, right after the little message let me know that AOL was installing something called “additional software”. There was no opt in, no opt out, just a bunch of applications marching in and setting up house.
In addition, it’s a shame what they’ve done to Netscape. I was going to download the latest and greatest version of the browser to test newly written web pages with and discovered that something in that milk simply ain’t clean. First, you download something called a stub, then when you go to install the thing a EULA from hell demands all kinds of concessions, rights and food rights to all your children. That’s when I decided that I didn’t really care what my web pages looked like in Netscape.
“there are still more people out there on dialup”
That simply does NOT matter. There was a time when there were more buggy owners than car owners. There was a time when there were more black and white TV owners than color TV owners. There was a time when there were more AM radio listeners than FM radio listeners.
The simple fact of the matter is that AOL is unprofitable. They could have a BILLION users, but if they are unprofitable, and their business model is dead. So once again, what’s the point?!
AOL is outdated… some would say that Microsoft is outdated… a match made in heaven!
AOL’s ani-virus protection and spam filters are very useful, and bring them business they wouldn’t otherwise get. They are even selling to broadband customers who get their connections from others!