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T A B L E__T A L K When macro viruses strike! What do you do? Exchange tips and horror stories in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Going once, going twice and growing like crazy Where's the rest of me? Showdown at the HTML corral The little operating system that could User-friendly?
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BY ANDREW LEONARD It's a bad time to be an America Online basher. AOL's stock price is sky high, there isn't a serious competitor in sight and the company has even booked real profits for the last few quarters -- a novelty for the decade-old online access provider. Which makes it a good time to publish a book with a grandiose title like "aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web." Even if Case hasn't really beaten Gates and the concept of "nailing netheads" doesn't make much sense (have they been won over or annihilated?), one out of three isn't that bad. Author Kara Swisher is a solid reporter, formerly with the Washington Post and now working for the Wall Street Journal. She also had the great good luck to be beneficiary of what the jacket copy describes as "unprecedented access" to AOL during the tumultuous year of 1996 -- when everything possible went wrong for AOL. Her account of the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and rise and rise of AOL is skillfully constructed, full of new information and sure to be relied on as a basic reference for future questions about AOL's corporate history. But corporate history alone doesn't quite satisfy the palate. The story of how Case confounded his critics and sent AOL's stock into the stratosphere only skates the surface of some of the larger questions that make AOL's ascendance so inherently interesting. AOL now claims some 14 million subscribers. In conjunction with the Internet, it is helping radically alter how people connect to each other, get their news and entertain themselves. What does that mean for politics, for the economy and for the established media powers? You won't find any answers to those questions in "aol.com." Heck, you don't even get an explanation of why a book about the most recognized brand in cyberspace, AOL, was given the bizarre title "aol.com" -- as if AOL's Web site was the key to its success. And that should be a tip-off, of sorts. In general, Swisher provides very little sense of what AOL is like from a user's point of view -- aside from repeated references to its "simple interface." There are scads of profiles of corporate execs, but hardly any discussion of the AOL experience. AOL is a boiling cauldron of community creation and a massive experiment in online interaction, but we never hear about what all those people are actually doing or how they feel about their own online ups and downs. Instead, AOL is consistently viewed from the perspective of Wall Street analysts -- quarter by quarter, with most attention focused on the stock price. And even when AOL does fumble, as it often has, Swisher is careful to distance herself from any editorial judgments. For example, in 1995, AOL binged on a buying spree, acquiring a string of smaller, Web-oriented companies -- like GNN, BookLink, NaviSoft and WebCrawler. For most of those companies, AOL's ownership proved to be their doom -- most were mismanaged, underfinanced or completely ignored as AOL execs repeatedly changed their focus. Swisher's conclusion? "By early 1996, some of the acquisitions would be called ill-conceived." Intriguingly, the strongest display of editorial attitude comes when Swisher positions AOL's success against the elitist scorn of the "digerati" -- those Silicon Valley snobs who look down their noses at the AOL hoi polloi and not so secretly root for it to fail. AOL's triumph, then, is the triumph of the common man, of Case's sense for what will play in online Peoria -- and a rebuke to all those Net gurus who live for their Internet shell access and sneer at the pap in Case's monthly letter to AOL subscribers. Swisher makes her point of view most obvious when she castigates Newsweek journalist Steven Levy for being "utterly condescending" and "spectacularly wrong" in an article he wrote in January 1996 calling proprietary online services "dead men walking." Levy predicted such services had little chance of succeeding in the long run without being completely subsumed by the Internet. Swisher writes that Levy's piece "perfectly represented the attitudes of the Net nobility at the time." Swisher's take is oddly skewed. The misadventures of the entire field of proprietary online services over the last two years have proved Levy far more right than wrong. CompuServe (now a unit of AOL), Prodigy and to a certain extent MSN have long been eking out a bread-and-water existence on death row. AOL only just barely escaped the electric chair by rejiggering itself as a glorified Internet access provider: imitating the monthly flat rate fees of its ISP competitors, immensely simplifying subscriber connectivity to the Web and abandoning much of its original entertainment content. AOL does appear to have made the cut: Its 14 million subscribers now constitute a membership base that can be sold to advertisers and other businesses for significant sums of cash. Swisher recounts that story with expert competence. But "aol.com" is far from the definitive book on AOL and "the War for the Web." There's too much left unsaid and uninvestigated. And who knows? The "Net nobility" might still have the last laugh. AOL is the ultimate middleman -- and the Web thrives on cutting out middlemen. - - - - - - - - - - - -
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A NEW AOL CHRONICLE PAINTS THE COMPANY'S RISE AS THE TRIUMPH OF THE ONLINE COMMON MAN.