Report: AOL Considers Offering Services for Free

[kelly]

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/07/06/aol/index.php

[dolphin]

Interesting!!!

[snuffysbluff]

[gunug]

Well they might just have put the proper price on their product.  Well, on second thought they'd have to pay me!  

[kimmer]

I must be missing something. How does giving away their service and losing "about 8 million of its 13 million dial-up subscribers", translate to more revenue/healthier company?

[gunug]

Once upon a time a company called America Online gobbled up a large piece of the dial-up IP business by suckering a lot of people by bundling their software in hundreds of thousands of primitive computers called "PC's" because if you bought a PC then a Mr. P.T. Barnum had a name for you.  However what they had to offer has long since become old and stale and and like 5 day old fish has started to have an bad smell.  They hope to bring back market share by doing this thing that they've doing.  My take is "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!"

Wow, I've got a houseful of 17-18 year old boys who are playing a killing game and it's making me terribly curmudgeon-like.

[krissel]

I loved this comment from one of the article readers:

QUOTE

Just think about how hard it will be to cancel if they are giving it away...

 

[()]

Get them by advertising for free, then once they got them, and then charge them.  It's like the Netzero for free at one time.  You will be paying for calling AOL for assistance, and you'll also be bombarded with all the crappy ads, spyware etc.

Netzero offered their service for free, but now it's 9.99 and 14,99 for faster speed dial up.

AOL has lost business due to all of their monitoring, updating your computer AOL all the time, and it all adds up to be very annoying.

At school, people that "USE" to have AOL have switched to Verizon, and Cable high speed internet service.

I found that AOL is more of a nuisance than anything.


I recommend to let their company just go belli-up .  Make them suffer for trying to take over the internet .  

Bring back Earthlink, and some of the other good net-servers that use to be around and helped their customers .

[kcourt]

Why do you need these services anyway - you set up your own home page and don't need them?  I used to have earthlink when I used dial-up, but that was long ago.  When I got cable, they have their own home page and other services, included in the cable fee.

I think they just get in the way anyway.  It might have been good for those who were not into computers, but if you have any computer saavy at all, you don't need these services.

Just more ads and other annoying things anyway, such as another way to get you on their E-mail lists!

Kathy

[Parker]

yay...
my favorite price
FREE

what about when you want to cancel?? how will they treat you then?
lol