1. 25 years ago a 28.8k modem and Cyrix 486 with 8mb ram on AOL had better end-user performance than today’s most popular web apps. There is still no mass-market equivalent to the appeal of those chat rooms. Technology will never defeat latency bloat of tracking hooks.
2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It leads me to believe that ‘the metaverse’ will always suck, not matter how good the technology gets.
3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened, they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But how? Who thought this was a good idea?
DSL and cable killed them. I had aol until the cable company offered high speed and by that time I wasn’t really using AOL as a client as I had moved to Linux. My parents still used windows and had no problem just using Netscape/IE or whatever since the browser had by then become the killer app.
My take is that the independent dial-ups killed their ISP business long before cable (1996). Then came their $2/mo IP-only service, which was okay, but slow to develop new features. Then came the AIM days, which seemed to dominate an entirely new epoch of the internet, the P2P era, although nobody was making profit. Next was the cloud/advertising/platform epoch, and they disappeared. No effort at all to win that market, develop something new, or to extend the relevance of AIM by integrating with social platforms.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Time Warner destroyed their investor appeal. Wall Street was ready to fund 10 years of internet innovation losses, but not for old media. Throwing away investor money like that is just shockingly obtuse, had to be a decision made by a hostile board that was taking a cut of the merger.
If someone built the same featureset as AOL had, I bet it would be faster today. I remember massive annoying delays, computers freezing and crashing, not to say anything about download speeds.
I think our memories of the past are rosy, plus they are not making a direct comparison. IRC chat programs are pretty snappy when they have feature parity; Slack is bloated because it does a whole lot more than AOL Chat.
Whether you like the features or want to pay for them with the decreased performance, that's a different issue that I have no opinion on.
2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It leads me to believe that ‘the metaverse’ will always suck, not matter how good the technology gets.
3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened, they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But how? Who thought this was a good idea?