Aol.com Pages: 170 - 235

Summary:

AOL’s good luck streak was quickly ending, especially when they found out that their company was not coming up with the money that they needed in order to keep them running efficiently. They noticed that each day, copious amounts of their customers were cancelling their accounts and leaving AOL. The big question was where all of these costumers were going and what was causing them to leave. This was the question that the executives of AOL had to figure out and fast.

            They came up with the supposed answer. Users did not want to pay for their internet service by the hour. They were not happy with the pricing, which is why many of them were leaving the service. Investors had to come up with ideas to both make money and keep AOL from losing its valued customers. So they developed a scheme where the subscribers would pay a flat rate for certain amount of hours and after they used all of those hours, they would have to continue paying the hourly fees. Many subscribers were unhappy with these problems and other growing problems and some even took it to the next level by filing lawsuits against the company. These problems were just another beginning for AOL.

            One day while one of the executives of AOL was on a vacation in Italy, he went to a nearby café and got a newspaper and on the front cover it read “AOL É Morte” and he didn’t have to be Italian to understand that it meant AOL is dead. What in the world did that mean?

At the same time, Steve Case the president of AOL was at his house also having difficulties connecting to the internet. He went to the nearby facility and saw that the whole system was down, and no one could figure out why. They fixed the problem eventually, but it didn’t stop the names and the mocking. List after list the names just grew, “America Outtaline”, to name one and surprisingly most of this came from 14-15 year old high school students who had a good grasp of internet programing.  

            The problems continued for AOL especially with more lawsuits coming their way. One of the most horrible was one that was brought up about child pornography surfacing throughout the internet. Since it was illegal, pictures of these sexually explicit acts should not have been floating throughout the internet, but they were.

More and more people were starting to disprove of AOL and the things that was running through their internet services. The problem escalated and it became a Supreme Court case. Steve Case, president of the company was becoming more and more overwhelmed at the problems his company seemed to be racking up. He was tired of it and so were many of the other employees of AOL. Unfortunately, they had to face problems because they all knew it was not going to stop anytime soon.

Quote:

‘“At least for them, when the shuttle comes down, the mission is over and they can relax. We never can.”’ (Swisher 179).

Reaction:

When AOL’s online service crashed, they knew they had a huge problem. Millions of their customers depended on them daily, and this would be an enormous setback to all of them.  Matt Korn, an AOL employee compared his job to working on a space shuttle mission, but unlike astronauts their missions never ended. They would always have to monitor everything precisely and make sure that everything is running well at all times. Being an employee at AOL meant you always have to be patient and be willing to understand that you’re always going to have to be prepared for the worst and also be prepared to deal with it.