What happens when Netzero goes AOL Bashing? Take a look yourself.

AOL already has a weapon against Netzero in place. They recently started selling ISP services through Netscape again for $9.95 a month (imagine that). They have also decided to start working on a new integrated browser suite based on FireFox and Thunderbird.

The thing about AOL (and MSN for that matter) is that you get much more than the Internet. They have exclusive content only available through their servers. Their content includes things like complete magazines, games (they have had Neverwinter Nights since 1992), custom chat rooms, concert simulcasts, movies and more. Many large websites such as iVillage and Motley Fool actually got their start as AOL Content providers back in the Early 90s. Internet access is actually provided as a free service on top of everything else that AOL offers.

AOL sadly enough is on its death bed and its screaming for someone to put it out of its misery.

Don't get me wrong, AOL in and of itself has some great properties including Netscape, Moviefone and Winamp and as part of the Time Warner conglomerate - they have access to untold amounts of magizines, movies, tv shows and music, yet despite all that they were never able to pull it all together into a package that people would want.

That and thier amazing broadband stategy "Dial up will be around forever" has seriously hurt them. In thier quasi attempt at entering the broadband market, they've gone head to head with Roadrunner on some networks - competing in essense with themselves!

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Final Fantasy

Do you financials to back that up. They are still growing at about 2 million users a year which is nothing to sneeze at.

Never did understand the Roadrunner issue and why they didn't integrate the two.

And they horribly managed those properties. I don't think any of the Nullsoft crew that started Winamp works there anymore, and look at what they did with the too-early releases of Netscape 6 and Winamp3.
As an old Roadrunner customer for three years, I'm glad they never did. RR was good. They'd always try to convince me to pay another $15/month to add AOL Broadband to my service, but I never saw the point in it.

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vinnie garcia - web guy

Nullsoft (makers of Winamp) is a wholly owned subsidiary. They make their own release plans. The original developers of Winamp just recently left after being scolded by Time Warner for working on Peer-to-Peer networking software. Software that drains a lot of money out of the parent companies music, television and movie properties.

Netscape 6 was released early because it was already on the chopping block. You forget the same people who wrote Netscape 6 are the people working on Firefox now. They released it early to keep their jobs a little while longer.

Both issues seem pretty self-service on the part of the developers themselves.