Fast Talk

The problem with success is the it quickly can become blind to others and their potential to leverage a culture in whom you take for granted. We must always stay aware of the infinite possibilities of our accomplishments. We have never reached our potential, or else, we have reached the end of innovation.

Shortsightedness and a deaf ear toward what the young and influence leaders want. Their IM was huge, but that is where they stopped innovating.

Two quick reasons I see.

1. Office bureaucracy and office politics. Unlike Facebook who initially started with startup mentality with employees with very little to lose you have AOL who people have built there lives around and and not just a few people thousands of people. It is funny what happens to most companies once they "make it" usually they don't want to risk anymore.
2. It is not what it does. They way that AOL has marketed its previous product is not that same.

The same reason Microsoft didn't invent the iPod

Simple --- AOL is old-school media and has a corporate culture that is antithetical to innovation and the way folks communicate in the 21st century.

Their roots were sunk in old media models that push content rather than organize markets and channels, allowing users to provide the content.

AOL was covering too large of a landscape (their target social demographic was all of America; children, teens, adults). Also, they were hard selling. Facebook was a free social media community. America Online was charging a ridiculous monthly fee for internet service provision, and they continued to do so long after the advent of hi-speed internet. When you are more-so concerned about the value of a dollar than about providing a service with unmitigated marketing passion, you will always, undoubtedly, lose out to your competitors.

Because AOL was a scam! They didnt know anything about technology, but alot about scamming investors and clients.

Because they are caught up in red tape aka the approval process and their leadership is worrying aboout who ccame up with the idea. They are not challenging themselves positively.

I don't think anyone thought of it.

AOL IS TIME CONSUMING FOR NOTHING

BECAUSE OF JOB IN SECURITY. THEY THINK IF THEY GO ON VACATION, THE EMPLOYEER WILL HEIR SOME ONE AND THEY TO FIND AN OTHER JOB. WHICH COULD BE PAINFUL.

here's the short answer: EARLY is good and LATE is bad.

Short-sightedness, arrogance, and probably because it was taken over by Time Warner, a moribund analog company which has no clue about the digital age.

As a former AOL employee, I was there for the rapid decline that occurred after the Time-Warner merger and the dot.com collapse.

AOL stopped being the internet juggernaut who would take on the world and became a risk-adverse organization with a corporate parent in Time-Warner who liked the boatloads of cash the subscription business continued to deliver each quarter.

The layoffs started and along with those cuts, good people started to leave AOL in droves. It was a very difficult time, with very little appetite for innovation.

I believe the best thing that could happen to AOL now is for it to be spun-off in some way so it could be independent or purchased by a company with a high tolerance for risk.

There were many times in the 90s that AOL was going to die. Microsoft was going to get us, the internet would bury us, Yahoo was the next big thing, etc. But, the company had a survival instinct at that time and we worked very hard to make everything look so easy.

I think it's time to see if there is any of that instinct and ability to innovate left. There is a still a large group of people that depend upon AOL properties each day. There has to be a business in there somewhere that can be successful in the long-term.

AOL miscalculated the speed at which they handled speed.

Because AOL was never innovative past its conception. They exist on the notion that most consumers are uninteligent and therefore would never try to use another service. Even when you try to cancel an account, they will still try and convince you to stay by telling you about some useless feature that does not apply in any way to the issue at hand. This isn't the year 1999 anymore. People want to access the Internet... For the Internet. Not for everything else that AOL will throw at you. They missed the boat, and they will suffer far more than they are now. Only time can tell.

Lack of ability to innovate.

The success of sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Google came from their culture. The idea was sound, sure, but the culture of each of those founders/businesses is what allowed them to succeed.
It sounds like (just finished FastCompany's article on the subject over the weekend) AOL's culture has never been what is needed to foster ideas like this.
So, "AOL leverging its community to become what Facebook is" was probably never possible simply because of the way things are run at AOL... The philosophy of open thinking and running-with-ideas just isn't there. The way a Time Warner has been successful doesn't translate to how AOL will have to think and operate to be successful in the future.
Ben Murphy / TheFatherLife.com

They were mired in their paid dial-up internet access model which has almost become a footnote in the medium's history. They didn't focus on what could have been a new lease on life in the community space. For shame.

I feel as though the goals of AOL were skewed. AOL you paid monthly. Facebook is free. Consumers what would you like something that is $29.99 a month or something that is FREE

You have to remember what the AOL customer base was like. In 1996 we started an ISP which completed directly with AOL and did really well. At the time AOL = "easy" and local ISP = "hard". The people that used AOL were not "movers" by any means. Most of them didn't know that there was an Internet. They actually thought that AOL _was_ the Internet.

Although, they had dedicated users that would have followed AOL wherever they went, the demographic was filled with non risk takers. Facebook (which started out as a site for college - risk takers) succeeded based on their demographic. The features catered to the "hyper" connected individual that needed instant gratification and ultimate communication with their friends. AOL would not have succeeded because they didn't have the right user base.

I read this article. I was admazed how cutting edge AOL was. In my view, AOL got too big. They had the mindset of big execs, not small scappy operations. In this light they simply were blinded to see the inventory of tools that they had. Instead they please the suites and not thier customers.

because they're idiots.

Corporate barriers. Theres no innovation when the company gets to that size..at least with new social media marketing.

No web 2.0, moreover people like more innovative stuff.

There is nothing unique abt AOL...nothing new to offer..Moreover, the Ad campaign that was run ( In India atleast ) was not attribute/benefit focussed that would compell anyone to log on..It was too generic.

I'm reminded of Taleb's book "Fooled By Randomness" in which he dissects and ridicules the obviousness of hindsight predictions.

Facebook wasn't started by a billionaire, but by people just like myself and other posters. If AOL is a bunch of idiots for not starting their own Facebook, then we're al just as idiotic.

Or think of it this way; we're all in the process of "lacking innovation" as we plug away at whatever it is we do while the next Facebook (or AOL for that matter) is incubating in someone's mind, even as I write this. . .

Point being, and this gets back to Taleb's book, is that these things are the infamous black swan type of events. There's too much randomness in life to simply say "they should have 'gotten' it."

They still though of themselves as an ISP rather than a community.