From technology to politics to video games; these are the random thoughts of a geek with too much time on his hands

Coming close behind the announcement of a two-year low in share prices, Time Warner is expected to launch yet another plan to save the ailing service provider, America On-Line.  The new plan, the fourth in five years, is to give away the email and web services components of AOL for free.

This plan hopes to recapture some of the market share taken by rival free mail and web services such as Google and MySpace.  While AOL will be giving away a large portion of its service for free, it will retain the subscription based dial-up service, which accounts for 80% of their revenue.

The target date for these free services is August 2nd.


Comments
on Jul 27, 2006
That explains the reason that AOL Email now has Adverts on the inside of the email for Ebay , etc . They were sneaky before they did all this - they offereed all their dial up users a discounted rate if they signed up for the next 12 months. Since then - service has been iffy. You get knocked off line if your idle for 20 minutes and that includes typing a long email. You hear a ding ding ding sound and you have 10 seconds to find the box to hit " yes " I want to remain online...time to look for a new carrier. I only kept them because of their message boards and the style of their email. But they no longer attend their own message boards and now their email works when it feels like it.

They wonder why they are not doing well. Im sure there are better carriers out there now.

on Jul 27, 2006
They haven't gone far enough. When they start paying me to use their services, then I'll consider it.