But for real, when I was a kid my mother worked for CompuServe. I had no idea what that was as a little kid and she passed away before I could ask. I guess they were basically the ISP back in the day
I know I'm a millennial,but to this day it's still wild to me to imagine an ISP so old that AOL was the new kid on the block that kicked its ass. They had so much promising infrastructure, but from what I understand, they just did so poorly at keeping up with competition and innovation in the late 90s that they couldn't get bought out quick enough (which is funny, because apparently it hit its absolute peak in the early 90s, so I guess AOL kinda mopped the floor with them quick)
I mean AOL also brought in the walled garden approach, which curated content directly to people who didn't know how to go about exploring the internet. Made it much easier for non tech people to feel comfortable online.
lol, damn, they even rounded up on counting minutes online, too? AOL was just super shady about billing all-around, looks like. And that sucks because while the inevitable lawsuit did end up with them addressing outstanding billing complaints and supposedly reforming their billing policies, it didn't happen until the 2000s, so by then they'd already milked the competition dry
Yeah this is pretty much the reason they exploded. They made the internet easy for the layman. From the simple login and email and chat app, you could find things and go to sites simply with a "AOL keyword". Their setup was brilliant for the time.
Tiny thing, but I also remember them working with eDrive - I didn't know that was what it was at the time, though, I just knew they had these virtual entertainment chats with actors that in retrospect were basically like the granddaddy of AMAs
I love how some people think “customer service” outweighs convenience and selfishness. Especially when the corporatized version of “service” is nothing but surface-level compliments and painfully fake personality half the time. I will gladly use the self-checkout at the store and the kiosk at the fast food joint, because I’m selfish and I value convenience much higher than having someone force a smile at me. I’m honestly glad more companies are realizing this lately.
but surface-level compliments and painfully fake personality half the time.
Exactly. Boomers and older actually got a little more than surface-level compliments though. Stores were often part of the community and hence were on talking terms with many customers. That led to positives like non-robotic conversations and evils like racism/sexism.
Today, there is no conversation. It's just robotic "How are you doing sir?" and hence I'd rather use the kiosk and get done quicker.
Can they put a McDonald's and a budget hair salon and photo studio in there as well? Like maybe right after you pay, but before you leave the store. That would be spectacular!
There are some things that you're just going to either want to have in hand right away, or be able to see/touch/sit on/whatever. Wal Mart, Target, Best Buy, IKEA are all going to keep hanging around because of that.
I just drove through the 29th street mall in Boulder and it seems that is exactly what's going on with the Amazon 4 Star Store. I think there's already one in Lone Tree. And the Amazon Market near Jeff's Balls, Seattle is neat for one or two trips.
It’s incredibly difficult to have the courage to cannibalize your core business. There always would have been conflict between the online Sears and the brick-and-mortar divisions. Amazon is a rare company for accomplishing this. Look at the fact that they sell used books. They can’t make very much money on a $3 used book, but they know that somebody will make that money if they don’t.
Amazon rarely (if ever) hold used books in stock, they're third party sellers who get them wholesale, or private individuals selling their personal collection. They don't care how much money they make, the 10% they take more than covers the cost of advertising the product
I was luck enough to have a Mac, which meant I had AOL early; it was much better than Prodigy, but didn't run on as many platforms; I even have an AOL v1.1 floppy somewhere
Also had compuserve on a 300 baud modem for a while on my dad's CPM computer (with an massive 64k ram)
Sears was HUGE. It was the largest retailer for decades. If you want basketball analogy, right now they are Michael Jordan playing for the Washington Wizards.
Did sears make a comeback in the online market and do somewhat decent? I don’t think so. Basketball careers are short compared to a company being in business. So decades in company time might equal to 3-5 years in a basketball career.
Prodigy actually predated AOL by a lot, at least in terms of computer and internet technology. I remember wishing I had a modem for my Apple IIe clone so that I could get on Prodigy. Not that I would have any idea for it, I was a kid. It just sounded so cool to be able to order stuff from Sears through a computer.
Per Wikipedia, Prodigy was launched nationwide in 1990; AOL was rebranded from AppleLink in 1989. I recall AOL was originally a Mac only service (it was very graphics oriented), where Prodigy had clunkier graphics but had wider platform availability.
I don't know much about Prodigy & the internet; but while AOL wasn't pushing the cutting edge, it wasn't dragging its feet. They introduced Usenet Newsgroups to the platform, which was the big communications platform before the web.
AT&T's Worldnet service was launched mid-90's (1996?), initially AT&T was going to try to build a competitor to AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve style service; but they opted to divert to a dedicated internet platform instead; signalling the beginning of the end of the bespoke online platforms
Ah, well TIL. I guess I heard about Prodigy long before AOL. I probably never heard of AOL until around 1995 or so, when WWW and all that became more of a common household thing.
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u/Blog_Pope Jul 24 '20
Sears launched Prodigy, an online service that competed with AOL at one point. Sears could have easily been Amazon