And that AOL & TW management just doesn't get IT
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it".
- Winston Churchill
HISTORIANS WILL ONE DAY SAY that Google not only sparked a revolution in the way people used webmail at the beginning of the XXI century by giving away almost unlimited space, but I also hope they say that Time Warner and its AOL unit -thanks to the wisdom of its execs- wasted every opportunity to be a major player in the internet landscape by repeating a pattern of lack of commitment to technology R&D, leaving behind a graveyard of dead products, and by not having any long-term strategy besides "milking the most of the current user base and restricting the end-user experience ever more so".
If people needs further proof of AOL and Time Warner's lack of understanding of the Net and the software/IT world besides the firing of all the programmers on Netscape's payroll that were contributing for years to the Mozilla project, one dark day in 2003 - people who was an invaluable asset for the corporation, allowing it to control its own software destiny and create more opportunities to itself, I refer people to
Netscape Calendar. Yes, very few people remember it, but it worked, and it was active. Archive.org keeps a
copy I think, dating back to April 1999. Until Netscape management decided to shut it down.
Shut down, like they did with "Netscape Radio" a music streaming services that was based on Real Audio feeds, which was *really* cross platform and worked well, before AOLTW execs turned it into an AOL brand -"Aol Radio"-, and incidentally stopped the cross-platform Real streams in favour of their own technology taken from Nullsoft but delivered as an ActiveX control that runs on IE only. They had to create a Mac OS-X
version of the AOL Radio player from scratch last October to please the Mac community, still leaving out everybody else. All this effort and waste in the name of, what?. They had a Netscape Radio which worked across platforms from day one on Linux, Windows, MacOS, and was in operation. And they had a Netscape Calendar before Google Calendar, which they could have retooled using modern technologies like AJAX. And they had a Netscape Webmail that worked, at a time. Way before GMail. They just let it rot while Google steam rolled with its innovation.
You might have loved him or hated him, but in the days of Steve Case, at least AOL had a tech strategy based on supporting open source and using that to battle Microsoft. Despite the financial issues. Despite the accounting and the Wall Street bubble. AOL had a tech strategy of independence and challenging the Microsoft monopoly. That's why AOL wanted at one point to convert all of the AOL user base from using the embedded IE engine to Mozilla's Gecko. That's why they partnered with Gateway to do the linux and Mozilla powered "
Connected Touchpad" internet appliance. That's why at one point there were rumours about
AOL buying RedHat. -Looking back, thank the heavens it never happened, as the people who sidelined Case probably would have sold it to Ballmer.
The problem I see is that the execs at AOL/Time Warner seem to have the same lack of clue about the Net and the effort in R&D and in-house human resources needed to succeed, as they did when they "got rid" of the "Netscape Expense" to improve the company's quarterly results. The problem is, in this industry you can save a quarter or two, but ruin the company's long-term future. That's what Time Warner is doing. Which brings me back to Netscape Calendar. The page currently reads "we plan to launch a new and improved calendar product in the near future". That page is dated 2004 and has been standing with that legend for months with no sign of the "new" Netscape Calendar ever arriving. See, after Case resigned, I lost any hopes of the corporation ever getting its tech act together. Some would appropriately say: "why bother?". And they might have a point. But AOL/Time Warner had so many resources and advantages by being first to market in so many areas - not to mention the brand mindshare - that it's mind blowing how they retreated on every field by embracing the culture of the quarter profits, the
http://<u><font color="#0000ff">chea...ing</font></u> and not seeing the big picture of the long-term strategy. In the words of Scot McNealy -who was interviewed right after Jonathan Schwartz denied he was going to grind the axe or "shrink Sun" according to the wild expectations of some Wall Street "
gurus": "My legacy isn't where the stock is today, it is where it will be four years from now". Will AOL and Time Warner get a strategy that goes further than the narrow minded quarterly outlook?.
The INQuirer
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