AOL’s new strategy to give away its services at no cost met with tons of skepticism in the press and blogosphere. This CNN/Money piece has the headline “Free AOL: Too Little, Too Late?” Other headlines: “AOL giveaway doesn’t guarantee success,” “AOL freebies won’t guarantee success,” and on and on.
My absolute favorite item that casts a huge cloud of doubt over the last-ditch strategy is this piece by Mathew Ingram, which has the headline “AOL Joins the Party Five Years Late.” Mathew, whose writing is always fun to read, says:
If nothing else, the much-discussed decision to make America Online’s software and services completely free will result in a great laboratory experiment on a truly grand scale, an experiment that will hopefully answer this compelling question: Can a moribund online service — one whose very name has become synonymous with the word “lame,” one whose services are notoriously difficult to cancel, and one which has remained steadfastly a “walled garden” while all around it the benefits of advertising have become abundantly obvious - suddenly undergo a deathbed conversion and become an ad-driven online colossus after years of appearing to not really give a crap?
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:10 AM|Comments(0)
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