Post by Frank esshttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/business/25digi.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
I especially liked this:
"Long ago, the company's culture became accustomed to concentrating energy
on trapping customers who wished to leave. Last month, Eliot Spitzer, the
attorney general of New York, announced a settlement with AOL under which
the company, which did not admit wrongdoing, will stop rewarding customer
service personnel with generous bonuses based on the number of customers
they dissuade from canceling service."
We have a $5/month AOL account (not available any more) but I don't keep AOL
installed on my machine. I carry an AOL disk in my laptop case, sometimes
when I'm travelling I can't get online any other way (including RR, whose
dialaccess phone list isn't always up-to-date) and AOL is the only thing
that works.
One of the reasons we hang on to it is web hosting. You get 12MB per screen
name and essentially unlimited bandwidth, or at least I've never come up
against a bandwidth limit. I don't remember the service being down, ever,
in the last two years. With 5 screen names, we've got 60MB of reliable web
space for $5/month. You can get web hosting without being a member also at
aol hometown, but in order to get ftp you have to be a member and when
you're not a member you can only use that 1-2-3 Publish to create web pages
and you can't upload arbitrary file types.
Does this "open portal" mean that you won't need AOL installed on your
computer in order to get email?
- Kathy