Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

There is no "Free" lunch

Author:Lixian B. Chiu
Posted:8/8/1999; 1:54:31 PM
Topic:Is it time to short AOL?
Msg #:9264 (In response to 9252)
Prev/Next:9263 / 9265

A friend of mine uses a "free" service -- NetZero. Needless to say, the speed that he gets is even lower than AOL. And, successful logon often need many trials.

I used to think that AOL will not stay. After all, they are offering "Scale-down" or "less-advanced" services. But then, it just grows bigger, and gets more subscriber. After asking several friend of mine who used AOL, it turned out that it's the "limitation" that AOL imposed on them that makes them feel more comfortable. When they are using AOL, they are seeing an "integrated" app. Email, download, web, chat and IM all come under one package. On the other hand, if they sign up an ISP, they will be facing all those technical stuffs like FTP, HTTP ... and many different clients, like Web browser, FTP client, Email client, IRC client ...

As long as there are users like that, I don't think AOL will ever disappear.

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