{"id":596,"date":"2008-11-04T18:50:58","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T22:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/?p=596"},"modified":"2008-11-04T18:58:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T22:58:36","slug":"some-cheese-with-your-whine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/2008\/11\/some-cheese-with-your-whine\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Cheese With Your Whine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh AOL.\u00a0 You’re so pathetic.\u00a0 You don’t even have to say anything.\u00a0 You just ARE<\/em> pathetic.\u00a0 Sad.\u00a0 Completely backwards.\u00a0 Technologically retarded.<\/p>\n

When I hear you saying things like this:<\/p>\n

An Open Letter to Gmail: Happy Halloween! We love your costume!<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

you should know it does not make me want to sympathize with you. It really just makes me pity how you’ve managed to squander such potential.<\/p>\n

You had the entire freaking population eating our of your hand with those dial up CDs.\u00a0 For years, people thought AOL was<\/em> the internet.\u00a0 But maybe you got a little too comfortable.\u00a0 Maybe you kept pushing dial-up long past the point when it was still useful.\u00a0 And there was backlash.\u00a0 And now your image stinks. (along with your attitude, apparently).<\/p>\n

So there’s your first problem.\u00a0 Your image.\u00a0 You could figure cold fusion and people would think they’d have to use your crappy dial up service to get to it.\u00a0 Or deal with your abysmal customer service when the reaction didn’t yield as much energy as they’d like.\u00a0 You’ll notice that even in the comments to your post, most people confuse the online mail product with the old AOL Client (now in, for some inexplicable reason, in version 1.5b6 for Mac!).\u00a0 Tough break there.<\/p>\n

Your second problem is, and has always been, your interface.\u00a0 It is pretty much unusable.\u00a0 You could have all the features in the world, and if people can’t find them you might as well not have them in the first place.\u00a0 I used your webmail client back when I worked for you it was very difficult to navigate.\u00a0 Having used GMail for years now and AOL Mail a few years ago with the old interface, I’m not afraid to say: the new interface is a BLATANT RIP-OFF of GMail’s (just like 2 years ago when you ‘redesigned’ your homepage and it ended up looking exactly like Yahoo!).<\/p>\n

That last note is easily solved.\u00a0 Hire some good UI and graphic designers.\u00a0 (Oh wait.\u00a0 You just fired them all. Crapola!)<\/p>\n

But the core problem is more insidious.\u00a0 In every product of yours that I’ve seen (product, mind you — your AIM service API is actually quite nice) you suffer from feature overload.\u00a0 You throw in the kitchen sink on every product, and enable everything by default.\u00a0 And nobody can find anything.\u00a0 Google’s strategy, by comparison, has always been simplicity: get users used to a new, easily assimilated paradigm with a few twists, then introduce optional complexity.<\/p>\n

So yes.\u00a0 You could’ve done everything that GMail does way before they did.\u00a0 But I’m a pretty advanced user and I couldn’t find half of the features you’re talking about.\u00a0 I quickly got frustrated and left.<\/p>\n

In the end, though, what does it matter?\u00a0 You’ve lost.\u00a0 It’s not even a contest.\u00a0 I can’t think of a single one of my friends who still has an aol.com account.\u00a0 Most of them are @gmail.com.<\/p>\n

You lost this war years ago when a) Google offered its users a truckload of free disk space, b) they started with an invite-only Beta program that made them sound exclusive and c) spent a huge amount of time QAing their code before they released it (another little something you’ve never been very good at).<\/p>\n

Give us all a call when you want to play with the big kids.\u00a0 After you’ve had some time and think about what it is you think you actually want to be good at, how you can distinguish yourself from your competitors, and why you think we should pay attention to you.<\/p>\n

Until then, I think you need a time out.\u00a0 Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh AOL.\u00a0 You’re so pathetic.\u00a0 You don’t even have to say anything.\u00a0 You just ARE pathetic.\u00a0 Sad.\u00a0 Completely backwards.\u00a0 Technologically retarded. When I hear you saying things like this: An Open Letter to Gmail: Happy Halloween! We love your costume! you should know it does not make me want to sympathize with you. It really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[254,255,70,256],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants-and-raves","tag-aol","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-webmail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":598,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}