Is AOL going down for good?

November 22, 2:56 PMVirginia Beach Web 2.0 ExaminerRynard Moore

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Courtesy of Wikipedia.

AOL recently announced that it was planning to lay off up to 2500 workers or more than a third of its current work force.  This latest round of layoffs comes amidst the struggling company's preparations to be spun off from Time Warner.  It also poses the question, is AOL going to be around in the future?

In its heyday, AOL was an online and later Internet behemoth.  At the core of its business was its once popular dialup portal service which swelled to over 25 million members at its peak.  AOL was also the first of the online services to require proprietary software which used a GUI to access its portal.  Like CompuServe, AOL offered options such as email, online shopping and chat rooms to its subscribers.  Because of its unique GUI which was ahead of its time and the variety of services, AOL saw steady growth throughout the 90's.  At the end of that decade, AOL had surpassed the three other major online services, GEnie, Prodigy and CompuServe.

In the age of the Internet, AOL continued to grow at a astounding pace.  Spurred on by the building dot-com bubble and a 5 year exclusive agreement with Microsoft to bundle its software with Windows, AOL's value as a company increased significantly.  So much so that in 2001, AOL was able to take control of Time Warner, something that was shocking and unthinkable at the time.

Although popular, AOL was not without its issues over the years.  The company was highly criticized for its unsolicited mass mailings of floppy disks and CDs that contained its software.  Moreover, once the software was installed, it took control of user's computers making it difficult to remove.  Users also found that it was either difficult to be billed properly or to part ways with AOL in terms of ending subscriptions.  Many former AOL customers complained bitterly about the company's poor customer service polices, unusual billing practices and slowness to cancel accounts.  As a consequence, AOL has been sued multiple times regarding all of the aforementioned issues.

In the years since the merger with Time Warner, AOL as a company has gone into a decline.  The company's dollar value has dropped significantly and its once burgeoning dialup service has slipped to under 10 million subscribers.  In an effort to build revenue, AOL has been trying to transform itself from a Internet company into a online content provider supported by advertising.  The bad economy, however, is impeding those efforts due to the declining advertising market.  Now a financial drain on Time Warner, AOL is set to be spun off as a separate company on December 9^th of this year.  This will bring to an end arguably one of the most bizarre and disastrous mergers in US corporate history.

When the decade began, AOL was seen as an unstoppable force in the age of the Internet.  Now with some questioning AOL's survivability as a standalone company, it is faced with a bleak future.  As the decade ends, it is certainly a future that sharply contrasts the one that AOL had as the decade began.

Vox populi time: How to you feel about AOL's future?  Leave a comment.

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Sources: The Huffington Post and Wikipedia.