
Facebook is the new AOL - r0h1n
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/4/7488495/facebook-is-the-new-aol
======
rottyguy
Been awhile since I worked at AOL. One of the funnier moments for me was when
I started working there, someone referred to the client (the one they shipped
via CD) as WAOL (pronounced - Whale). IIRC, the executable was waol.exe.

Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had
it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to
Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.

~~~
madaxe_again
Man. The only purpose of all for me back in the day was that you could call
them up and they'd ship you a stack of 5.25/3.5 floppies so you could "share"
"the service" with your "friends". i.e. Punch a hole where the write protect
window should be and yay, free, really cruddy, media!

~~~
MichaelApproved
For a long time, the stickers they used on the 3.5 floppies would peal off
perfectly. No sticker residue at all.

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allendoerfer
I think Facebook is well aware, that it could be over tomorrow, that is why
they will survive. AOL tried to grow, I think Facebook acts more reasonable.
They know the others can not get them in the social network space, no matter
how hard they try, if they just secure their market share with acquisitions
and slowly increase profitability. They do not try to win in another domain as
the new Microsoft, Google does.

In the end Amazon will win. Most of the others make their money by advertising
or by selling technology to companies, which make their money with ecommerce
or advertising. Amazon owns every part of this stack, which actually makes
money. The bigger the Amazon brand grows, the less money will be left for the
others. At the moment, this is not visible, because the whole market grows.
Amazon knows this and just reinvests and waits.

~~~
Chronic30
Last time I checked Amazon's hardware line... didn't go too well. Amazon is a
retail company, not a software company. Remember that.

AWS (the closest thing to software Amazon owns) will converge to 0 profitably
as competitors copy the easily replicable service.

~~~
crucifiction
AWS and competitors are very capital intensive businesses. While the software
might be easy-ish to replicate with a medium sized software team, the capital
required to set up and then run dozens to hundreds of packed data centers is
prohibitive for most competitors. The cloud market will turn into the chip
market, where the capital cost of fabrication facilities is an enormous
barrier of entry to the market. That is why the only real potential
competitors in the space are from companies with lots of cash to burn and who
can leverage the same "we need data centers anyways" model that Amazon does.

~~~
a3n
But it doesn't have to be dozens to hundreds of packed data centers. It just
needs to be a lot of smaller operations, and a few mid tier like Linode,
providing the same service at various prices and scales that make sense to
various sites.

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chevas
Dvorak said the same thing...in 2010

[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp)

~~~
pcurve
or 2007 apparently.

[http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-
aol](http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol)

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sosuke
I know relating things is very natural, but I don't feel Facebook is the new
AOL at all until they offer ISP and a web browser. That is what made AOL AOL.
Facebook may be many peoples main destination, but it isn't how they connect
to the internet, it isn't primarily a gateway to other sites. Facebook doesn't
want you to leave Facebook at all.

~~~
vidarh
> Facebook doesn't want you to leave Facebook at all.

AOL didn't use to _let you_ leave AOL. For many years it was a 100% isolated
walled garden. _That_ is what made AOL AOL many years before AOL became an
ISP.

They only grudgingly started adding ways of accessing internet content as the
growth of the net so outpaced AOL that they had no alternative in order to
keep subscribers.

~~~
jghn
And so began the Eternal September and the <aol> faux-tag on Usenet.

I remember for a while on Usenet arguments were won by simply pointing out the
other person had an @aol.com address.

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Animats
Facebook is the new _Myspace_. Same basic concept. Same growth in ad density
over time. Same decline in customer experience.

AOL is still a dial-up ISP, with 2 million customers still paying $20.48 a
month. That's where their profit comes from. Their new junk-content business
turned out not to generate much profit.
([http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/07...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/07/aol-still-makes-most-of-its-money-off-millions-of-dial-
up-subscribers/))

~~~
erehweb
As your link states, most of AOL's revenue in fact comes from content. Most of
the profit comes from dial-up.

~~~
Animats
Fixed.

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wallflower
In one of the bargain-binned dot com frenzy era books, I remember an AOL
executive dismissively claiming that they (AOL) could put a AOL login or
logout popup ad that said "Click here to pay $19.99 for absolutely nothing"
and some fraction of a fraction of their customers would buy.

It cannot be ruled out that those kinds of ads won't ever come to Facebook.
Ads that buy with one-click (despite Amazon's patent) and rely on partial user
confusion and deception as a business model.

~~~
bbcbasic
I can rule it out.

If Facebook did that, or even if advertisers did that and Facebook didn't kick
them off, it will put the brand in serious trouble, they'll get fined, etc.

This is the sort of thing small scummy businesses do where the owner can hide
behind it, go bankrupt and start again. It's not something a top company would
do.

I am not saying big companies won't do evil things. This isn't going to be one
of them.

And also you don't need to confuse people into paying for nothing. You can do
it with their eyes wide open. In-game purchases, for example.

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mschuster91
In regards to Qualcomm dominance, thankfully there is no total domination yet
- especially in the lower/midrange segment, where there is MediaTek (heh, and
MediaTek is the 4th largest IC designer worldwide).

And actually, I prefer MediaTek phones - you can root every single one of them
and in contrast to other phone manufacturers, their preloader (first stage
bootloader) even allows reading back the entire ROM. No restrictions. (For the
interested, google for spFlashTool)

~~~
higherpurpose
I agree. Qualcomm is dominant, but not quite "Intel-dominant" in mobile,
especially when Apple makes another few hundred millions chips of its own.

That said, it's becoming increasingly worrisome that so many OEMs just
"default to Qualcomm" these days. If I were Samsung's CEO I'd put much
stronger focus on making my own chips and putting them in my own devices (just
like Apple), while _also_ selling them to others, just like they sell their
Super AMOLED displays and so on. I would also buy out AMD, mostly for their
GPU expertise, but also to enter in the server/data-center market, which is
more profitable than the mobile market. Samsung has the money and marketing
clout to do much bigger things than AMD can do right now alone.

I don't know what the hell Nvidia is doing in mobile, but they always seem to
screw something up. Their non-focus on energy efficiency in "mobile" and their
focus on "performance" for umm.. _tablets_ , has proven to be a mistake _with
every single chip generation_. Stop it, Nvidia! You need to win smartphones,
not tablets, which are a dying breed already. And to do that you need low-end
chips as well not just "PC-class mobile chips", otherwise you'll _never_ get
the market share you need to help you become "popular" in the mobile market.

And finally Intel - oh, Intel, how I despise thee. Two main reasons why I
don't want Intel to win even 5 percent of the mobile market. Short version: 1)
they are anti-competitive, 2) they don't deserve it.

Long version - Intel has started having quite the "monopolist culture" a while
ago (at least a decade). They've learned that playing the monopolist card when
in power "works" (to crush competitors and entrench themselves in the market),
and they try to use it as often as they can and to the limit of the law (or
even well beyond it, if no one is paying attention). Intel has almost wiped
out GPU vendors from laptops through strongarming of OEMs and shady pricing
tactics and, with Broadwell and Skylake having an even bigger focus on GPU
performance, I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia
GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe).

They also have a monopoly in CPUs for PCs and are now using the profits they
get there to sell their their Atom chips _below cost_ (a practice that's
_illegal_ in many countries, but either they aren't paying attention or Intel
manages to twist that into some kind of "business deal" they are making with
OEMs).

That's just the anticompetitive part. The "don't deserve it" part comes from
the fact that Atom sucks compared to the highest-end ARM chips, even though
it's built on 22nm FinFET, and those ARM chips are built on 28nm planar (if
we're to compare them at the time of market launch) - essentially a 3 year/one
node and a half process advantage for Intel. So they are trying to push bad
products into the market and gain market share by selling them below cost to
trick some OEMs into accepting their chips. And I say "trick" because that's
what it is - at best, a short term advantage of them, because if Intel would
ever have even 20 percent of the mobile chip market, those same OEMs would
have to pay them more than what they pay for ARM chips, because it's "Intel".

So many other shady Intel practices such as tricking consumers into thinking
"Celeron" chips are Celeron, when in fact they are Atom, lying about the
_real_ TDP/power values of their chips to make it seem like their PC chips are
almost comparable to ARM (while being misleading about the fact that they also
have much lower performance) and so on. Intel is a shady company through and
through when it comes to selling its products.

~~~
mschuster91
> Intel has almost wiped out GPU vendors from laptops through strongarming of
> OEMs and shady pricing tactics

You forgot one point: _good (open-source) drivers_. Intel drivers Just Work
(tm), no matter if the OS is Windows, Linux or OSX. AMD/ATI drivers... not so
much, and NVidia's work, but are still closed-source.

And the "The drivers Just Work" doesn't end for Intel in GPU drivers, but also
the other driver classes - just take wireless and chipsets. One driver package
for all, supplied by Intel, no need to hunt down obscure czech or russian
sites for drivers (hello, Atheros).

~~~
dublinben
You shouldn't need to look very hard for Atheros drivers, since they're often
included in the kernel. At the very least, they're in your distribution's
repository, since they're not proprietary.

~~~
mschuster91
I'm talking about Windows here, to be honest. I use both Windows and Linux
and, well, when I configure laptops, I always use Intel (and NV for the GPU)
components because they are guaranteed to work without spending hours on
Google.

------
rokhayakebe
Not sure what Google is but I still see most people do this:

Me: Yeah, go to xyzx.com

Them: Google.com ENTER -> XYXZ.com -> Click on first result

~~~
jghn
I see people do this from time to time and I've never understood it.

~~~
greenjellybean
I do this and the biggest reason is to avoid mis-typing and hitting a phishing
site.

~~~
jghn
Interesting, and fair point. I tend to type things explicitly for the opposite
reason, because I trust my fingers more than some obfuscated typo in an URL -
but I see logic on both sides.

OTOH normally when I ask the people I see doing this why, their answer is more
along the lines of "dunno" :)

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jcfrei
I think it will be different for VR this time around. Probably not in 2015,
but after that...

~~~
serge2k
I think we are hitting the point where the technology is there, even if it is
a bit rough. Unfortunately it is still bleeding edge, and it seems like
adoption will take a while.

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sidcool
Interesting Generalization. I contest that Facebook is in a much better
situation and condition than AOL.

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sgt101
Surely weechat is the new AOL - or does something that is only used by 800m
people not count?

~~~
vegabook
I unfortunately think you mean wechat and not weechat.

~~~
pyre
For reference:

\- [https://weechat.org/](https://weechat.org/)

\- [http://www.wechat.com/en/](http://www.wechat.com/en/)

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dksidana
Samsung is new Nokia

~~~
facepalm
But what is the new iPhone?

~~~
Joky
The 6? ;)

