I guess so Evan as of say one or two months ago, i think almost 5 mil now.
But the latest news as a matter of fact I heard somewhere that AOL is not
looking like such a sure thing now. The third differential of their growth
curve has gone neutral or some such. AOL is cleverly trying to get into
the isp scene, using their underlying private x.25 wires and so on. IE,
aol internally has made the decision that the future, ultimately, lies not
with their current business model - no matter how succesful it is just now.
Joshua never agrees with me but I still maintain that you should consider
aol (etc.) are easier to use than a real ISP. As a simple factual matter I
have at least, oh, 5 clients who just CANT use an ISP no matter how often I
convince them, because, it is just _too_ _hard_.
We 'computer people' FORGET how relatively hard it is to use a proper ISP.
Aol (etc.) _actually work_, you put in the disk and your credit card number
and it works, you can immeditaely start trying to pick up teenagers in
Boise, you can immediately read the NY times and business week, etc.
Also, no matter how often you assert ISPs are better price-wise, the very
simple fact is that (apparently) the VAST majority of AOLs customers pay
the flat aol rate - i.e., they do NOT go into extra aol-hours. Hence they
pay a very low rate per month, half the usual $19 ISP rate.
So when you assert "AOLs rate structure sucks" all you are saying is "it
sucks if you're one of the irrelevantly small percventage of computer geeks
who are connected on a modem more than a couple of hours per month."
So sadly, aol-like services are here to stay I imagine. But hopefully the
rumor that aol is switiching to netscape browser is true. That would mean
that about 70% of web hits instead of 35% would be netscape hits - making
life easier.
>
>(On the anti-AOL side, I suppose the company can still do a substantial
>amount of harm before its demise as a service provider, simply by
>conditioning people to accept stupid rate-structures, although the
>example of the phone companies suggests that the rates naturally flatten,
>given 5 or 6 decades.)
>
>--
>Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu
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