They have borked my email, it may be time finally, after many friends and co-workers have begged me, to make the big change.
All in all I can only think of a single, mega-successful software company that fucked up as bad as AOL has. That would be Novell, the one time networking giant which had about 80% of the business networking market in 1991, at the dawn of the dot-com boom. And yet somehow Novell utterly failed to hold onto to enough of that market to prosper while every other firm with a transistor or chip in its balance sheet soared skyward on the NASDAQ. As a stock-broker at the time I assumed, wrongly, I would never again see such mismanagement. And that was a valid assumption, until AOL in the last decade.
Um, Word Perfect?
WordStar?
Double Helix, Reflex, MacLion, 4D (& every other Mac database but FileMaker)?
Quicken?
I gotta stop, or I’ll go ’round depressed all day…
I did tech support for AOL at one point. There’s not much more depressing than being stuck explaining their mail system to someone. It’s all proprietary right down to the storage formats it saves things in. So unless they’ve finally noticed standards since I last dealt with them, you may be stuck having the software installed just to read old email. I pretty much loathe MS Outlook but even it’s not that stupid. :)
I think Novell stood out because so many clients had core positions in it. AMD was another one that went sideways while everything else was zooming. But Novell really surprised me, you’d think a network leader would do well during a networking megaboom.
A lot of the other firms that are mentioned by Pierce Butler died an unnatural death, murdered by Microsoft.
For an example of a company truly committing suicide, you have to go to The SCO Group, which pretty much died of greed – trying to install a tollbooth on the Open Source highway. They missed the first step – proving you had your code stolen and injected into Linux – and bounced on every stair tread on their way to bankruptcy court.
I might still have one of the 734 CD’s they sent me, if that helps.
I was a Novell CNA back in the mid nineties. The tests to get the CNE were HARD. It baffled me why so many companies were going with NT, which sucked so hard when Netware just kicked ass. At my last company we ran Groupwise on Netware for our email system simply because I was able to convince management that going to Exchange on Windows wouldn’t be cost effective. I was able to convince them because of screen shots of the Netware console monitor showing that the email server had been running for over 8 months without a restart, that the email sever never went down for maintenance, and that it would cost about 40K for the hardware and licensing to go to Exchange.
Novell products could be a real bastard to get working, but once they were up and running they were rock solid. The OS just ran and ran and ran. What a product. I tried to stay with them and get things moved over to Linux, but the bosses were unconvinced.
Thanks Bye, any idea why they bought a version of RISC in the middish -early 90s?
Novell’s marketing strategies, purchases, product development (apart from their core Netware product) and general operations never failed to baffle me. I think they needed to hammer NT, and at the same time develop a desktop OS or some way of interacting with the network OS that didn’t require a client sitting on top of some other OS.
On the network side, I don’t think they ever made graphical tools with Java that were as useful (and as fast) as just using text-based commands and consoles for working with the core network tools. Console One with all of it’s snap-ins and then the HTML based tools, while wonderful to behold, were often infuriating. For example, iPrint, which was the tool one had to use to install and distribute printer drivers to desktops spent a period of time during which it only worked with Internet Explorer. So if you were trying to manage things in a majority Windows desktop environment from a Linux desktop, or just with Firefox – you know actually support the direction Novell was moving – you’d run into an error message that you had to use IE to install the drivers. Maddening.
So, a longwinded way of saying, I have no idea why they did anything they did. It may be that since the core NW people were more aligned with UNIX type OSes and UNIX shops like Sun seemed to be heading toward RISC type CPU architectures, the Novell folks went that way too.
I’d nominate Xerox. PARC basically invented modern computing- Ethernet, modern (WIMP) GUIs, OOP, laser printers, and Ghu knows what else. Then they did nothing with them.
AOL still exists? Huh, who knew?
@jake – AOL amazingly exists. I drive by their campus every couple of weeks or so…most of the campus has been sold to Raytheon, and everyone I knew that worked there is now gone (usually laid off). I’m not sure what they accomplish anymore outside of their small portal presence.