This tweet from earlier today called to mind this graphic from a few months ago.

What annoys me with aol (I dont have the new fancy one) is I click mail, and log in, and instead of taking me to my mail it takes me to stupid news stories about celebrities, and I have to click "mail" again.

Why won't it just take me to my inbox?

Well, Crid, we "escaped" those company's lock-ins due to government action, (just not anti-trust) so I'm not sure the snark is duly warranted.

The tweet is spectacularly ridiculous, for reasons I shan't elaborate here.

As for making fun of AOL, I will, Amy, because for years and years, they signed up the most clueless people, and told them that they were the internet, and did their utter damndest to either make sure they never left AOL, or, if they did, utterly trashed the shit out of the rest of the internet.

Some of us still harbor some grudges about that. :)

And what, exactly, was the Government action that led us to escape those company lock-ins?

Ask Safeway. They just suspended an employee for stopping a man from beating his pregnant wife.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/05/15/monterey-county-safeway-worker-suspended-after-stopping-assault/

These companies failed to lock people in because they failed to keep up; not because the government "took action."

MSN, Compuserve, and AOL offered closed environments with very little freedom of content with high access costs (and lots of CDs to use as coasters). They were late to the game in offering access to the world-wide web, usenet, and other open environments. And even then, users had to got through the proprietary environment to get there.

Once people were able to get access to the Web without having to go through the painfully slow process of downloading the near-constant updates to the proprietary environment first, they switched en masse non-content-laden ISPs.

Content providers switched from creating and maintaining sites in mulitple proprietary environments to a single URL.

Change is what kept CompuServe, MS Network, and AOL from locking us in, not the government.

And change is what will keep Google, Facebook, and Twitter from locking us in. Remember mySpace?

Think back to 9/11.

"When the planes hit the towers, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was all of nine months old. Facebook (launched in 2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) were still no more than gleams in their founders’ eyes. In 2001, according to Forbes, the then-feared AOL-Time Warner was the ninth biggest company in America by market valuation, and the telecommunications giant WorldCom was the 25th most profitable. In 2002 AOL-Time Warner lost $99 billion, and by 2003 WorldCom was bankrupt." -- Matt Welch (Reason.com

These companies failed to lock people in because they failed to keep up; not because the government "took action."

The government took tax money, funded the research, and provided near-free access to what became "The Internet".

That's the action they took. Had there been no "Internet", there would have been some facsimile thereof, for sure, but the "free" version had the network effect of the colleges and university graduates familiar with it, and the massive benefit of not having to give in/compromise/give strategic advantage to a rival.

MSN, Compuserve, and AOL offered closed environments with very little freedom of content with high access costs

Eventually, yes. But that really didn't happen until well after the shift was underway, everybody had "internet" gateways in place, and was routing mail to aol.com, compuserve.com, etc.

Even until the late 90s, there was a lot of push by content producers to stay with the "Portal" setup, for both content and payment reasons.

You made your spot on AOL (or whatever site) and only AOL, and you got a cut of the proceeds. A website brought you no revenue, and cost a lot, by comparison. Only now is a lot of the web tools getting to the level of functionality that (especially AOL) had, and there are many people I know who miss a lot of features CompuServe innovated and never made the transition to the web with discussion groups.

they switched en masse non-content-laden ISPs.

Nope. They first started out with AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy or... and that's how they found OUT about straight ISPs and started moving over - eventually. Usually with someone encouraging/showing/telling them. People went online to the services first, and _really_ only started leaving in utter _droves_ when broadband started showing up. IOW: The ISP to the house is what really did in the paid portal. (For now. They'll be back.)

(whoops, hit submit too soon.)

In 2001, according to Forbes, the then-feared AOL-Time Warner was the ninth biggest company in America by market valuation, and the telecommunications giant WorldCom was the 25th most profitable. In 2002 AOL-Time Warner lost $99 billion, and by 2003 WorldCom was bankrupt."

Exactly. What happened between 2001 and 2003? Cable modems. (Which eventually forced the Bells to Get Off Their Asses About DSL... Somewhat.)

In 2000, ISDN access (128k, or 2x dialup) was starting to be replaced by DSL, which was a massively painful process on the end-users part.

I was near RTP, in NC, where there was no lack of technology or consumers, and ISDN was a safer bet, DSL was inordinately painful to get.

Then Time Warner finally rolled out Cable Internet in late 2000/early 2001, and blammo.

Those bankruptcies were driven by the ISP change, not the business model.

The government took tax money, funded the research, and provided near-free access to what became "The Internet".

Except that that occurred BEFORE AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and the others started up, and was a Defense project. Colleges started using it, and then the others got in the game. After the proprietary companies had their run for a while, independents came in and used the telecommunications companies' backbone (which was just the normal phone system then) to provide access directly to content without having to go through the closed-system gatekeepers.

In a large company, there is so much distance between the sales and customer service areas, that they don't talk much... they are usually under different directorates, sometimes enemies of each other.
Customer Service is a cost-center, NOT a revenue-center... and if the two hands don't have a connection? Well, they will not grasp that bad C/S drives a customer away...

maybe. They ARE gambling that you won't get torqued off enough to quit the service, while spending as little on you as possible.

It's the same with most service providers... their service is good, but when it breaks, you are screwed.

These are no longer services, but commodities, and I don't think that's going to come back.

Wayne:

That's almost correct - Compuserve actually was close enough that we can say it was "at the same time".

There was *a* network out there. But until the very late 80s, companies that weren't government connected couldn't get access. Even to the very late 80s, you had to get access via a university. (Lemme rock in this chair and tell you whippersnappers some stories about bang-path routing...)

Wasn't until the 90's that started to change.

And the late 80s was when AOL and Prodigy ruled the dialup waves. And through the 90s. All the way to....

The part that linked them all together was when the internet was opened to companies and now aol could send email through the internet to prodigy, etc. That then drove a interface war, who had the best content, and the easiest-to-use interface for a while.

So yes, the internet "predates" most of those - they started as PC's gained ascendancy, but it was the both killer app that caused people to sign up, and the killer of the services.

As the content on the "free" internet exceeded/surpassed the content providers, more and more people were freer to move to the cheapest access, including straight-ISPs, but the real jump occurred, as I said, when broadband made it to the house.

The crummy customer service can actually become part of the business model methinks, especially when most of AOL's customers are not terribly net-literate. Our hostess clearly is an exception, but most of AOL's customer base is pretty ignorant. When any customer service call becomes a nightmare, it only reinforces the non-savvy customer's belief that things are necessarily complicated, and that any change will bring even MORE frustration.

Well, Crid, we "escaped" those company's lock-ins due to government action, (just not anti-trust) so I'm not sure the snark is duly warranted.

Which government action do you speak of? I am unaware of such. Maybe I'm just completely ignorant, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft wasn't broken up, or even really inconvenienced by becoming a convicted monopoly.

Darth Aggie:

Look up just a bit. :)

Reminds me of EarthLink vs. QWest.

I had my DSL via EarthLink (because they bought the regional ISP that had bought my local ISP) a while back.

I upgraded to a faster setup and it stopped working; my telco (QWest) had had to move my circuit and change the ATM link as part of the process, and sent EarthLink a "hey, this guy's VPI/VCI pair changed, please update".

EarthLink cheerfully ignored that.

After hours (literally!) on the phone with people in India reading from scripts who literally couldn't help me (because they had no access to fix the problem even if they'd been allowed to go off script or the script had had any notion of my problem), I eventually figured out, from talking to QWest, what the problem is.

The guy at QWest was in Utah, and completely competent, and further not only could look at the network directly, but he could even change things.

In the end, after EarthLink's NOC never bothered to call me back about supposedly fixing the problem (after being in a conference call to India with me and the QWest tech, who assured the EarthLink people that it Really Wasn't My Modem)...

I'm now not giving EarthLink any money, and QWest is my ISP as well as my DSL provider.

There's a lesson in there - saving money on support can be a very, very bad false economy.

(Of course, QWest is now CenturyLink and I have no idea if their support is still any good...)

Anyone here buy Dell anymore? I don't, after spending hours ripping my hair out trying to convince some mysoginist bastard that I truly did know that my hard drive had failed, or that a power surge had fried my mother board. It got so bad that I (an IT professional) would make my then boyfriend ( a computer illiterate artist) make the call while I held up cue cards for him, because things always went faster if they heard a male voice.
From now on, I buy what I need and build it myself, cheaper and better and with lots less hassle. '
I learned very early on with my own customers, you just can't take anything for granted. You have to work just as hard for them when they call for help as you did when you were trying to make the sale, otherwise you will be looking at an Ex-customer.

> The government took tax money, funded the
> research, and provided near-free access
> to what became "The Internet".

Frogwash.

There's a class of human beings, called "despicable" (alongside other descriptions), which will attribute every good thing that ever happened to any human being as the willful, benevolent product of:

• God in Heaven

• Government in power.

And yet a child of four can plainly see that this preposterous... Cocksuckingly so.

In fact, young children — less-habituated to the petty hypocrisies by which clumsy adults extract fraudulent courtesy from each other — will often frame their recognition of this foolishness in just such language: "Mommy, why is that Pope such a cocksucking scold?" or "Daddy, why is that Congressman such a motherfucking liar?"

(Elizabeth Warren comes to mind pungently and repugnantly.)

There have always been personalities, including scholarship-sodden fuckballs wretchedly enriched by corporations seeking tax deferment, who thrive in careers coarsely goosed by the government's sadistic sex dance with Higher Ed. And misattribution for the internet's development is as old as the data-packet protocols themselves; hence AlGore's hoary, vapid boast the he "took the initiative in creating the internet."

Again: It's important to recognize that this madness infects every field touched by government... And government has filthy paws on almost everything, howsoever incidentally.

Government no more created innovation than religion created decency. And in as many cases, it's been the entrenched, technocratic enemy of progress rather than the noble champion.

"Unix-Jedi," your rhetoric is repellent. Feel shame, just as I feel shame for you.

(That was fun.)

Furthermore, your history is ludicrous. "AOL and Prodigy ruled" nothing: They were early, stumbling contenders.

(There's a first guy to get laid in every schoolyard, rarely to grow into the most talented, consistent, or even affectionate lover.)

Besides, it's extremely weird that a Unix guy would call them "waves." Don't betray your heritage, even if I mock you when you don't.

Never underestimate the influence of Compuserve on the online world, and until the '90s it was the online world . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

And my email is still 12345.6789@compuserve.com.

> ever underestimate the influence of Compuserve
> on the online world

Constraining it how?

Badly phrased.

What "influence"? Answer quickly just for sport: What internet phenomena, habits or strictures, positive or negative, are an obvious result of Compuserve (AOL, Prodigy) "influence"?

Never underestimate the influence of Compuserve on the online world, and until the '90s it was the online world . . .

It had a lot of influence but there was a lot more to the "Online world" then just it. I grew up using a lot of BBSes starting on a 1200baud modem (I'm sure the old(er) fogies will now pick on me for not starting on 300baud) and the glory days of fido net conversations were pretty sweet.

I really need to sit down and watch the BBS Documentary DVDs I bought when that came out.

I even ran a couple very small BBSes myself for a bit. I know several people that are unix admins here with me that initially all met through a fairly well known (in San Diego at least) BBS.

I did spend a tiny amount of time on Prodigy in the very early (black and white only) days before finding a local ISP long before AOL was even known (if they existed yet). I never had to "escape" from any of those companies.

"Then Time Warner finally rolled out Cable Internet in late 2000/early 2001, and blammo."
Nyah... we had them rolled out by TWC in San Diego no later then 1998. But we were actually a pretty early/test area I think and always had pretty good support through the local guy (Edwin IIRC) that was more lax at allowing servers and such run on home hosts as long as you didn't do anything illegal and didn't use an inordinate amount of the neighborhood bandwidth.

I've had the same email address since 1993, back when you still had to bang-path sometimes because not everyone had implemented the routing protocols. I use a locally-owned ISP.

(And when you have an email address for that long, you get bombarded... my ISP is filtering out about 300 spams a day directed at my email address, and I have to purge another 30-40 a day that get through.)

> I grew up using a lot of BBSes starting on a
> 1200baud modem (I'm sure the old(er) fogies will
> now pick on me for not starting on 300baud)

I loved BBS's. Those were great years... Much more personal than the internet. (And dude, you didn't miss ANYTHING at 300bps, I promise.)

> 300 spams a day

Gmail is essentially zero. A few sneak in every 15 weeks or so, maybe three in three consecutive days, but they're really fragments, cheesey and obvious (text-only) phishing jobs from Nairobi or wherever:

   Dear friend: You've woan the €23K in Contest
   Please repli immiediate:
   Name....._________________
   Address....._________________
   Account.(Nmber please)...._________________

Not too intimidating. And if there are any "false positives," they must not be very important. (Bankers and old girlfriends know how to find us, right?)

There's a class of human beings, called "despicable" (alongside other descriptions), which will attribute every good thing that ever happened to any human being as the willful, benevolent product of:

Crid:

When you're wrong, you're going full bore, damn the torpedoes, and does this hat make me look like a moron wrong.

I congratulate you on your drive.

And yet a child of four can plainly see that this preposterous... Cocksuckingly so.

Yes, your strawman is a strawman. Amazing, that.

Government no more created innovation than religion created decency.

You wouldn't have to take all the allegra if you weren't building all the strawmen.

The government built "The Internet". If you want to argue otherwise, well, that's fine and all, you're wrong.

There were other contenders, other possibilities, and other branches that would have taken the place of the internet, had it not existed, and been massively subsidized.

But it did, and was.

What the rest of your complaint is, I don't know.