AOL

I read this week that Google, which had bought a 5% stake in AOL in late 2005 for about $1 Billion, recently sold it back to Time Warner for a mere $283 million (or about 28% of what they paid for it).

I was working for a division of Time Warner when AOL bought the company, about ten years ago. I think most of us were largely indifferent to the transaction (and I doubt any of us could foresee that AOL would so quickly become unnecessary). But we did receive free AOL accounts. I don't think I ever used mine. (Back in the day, anyone who knew better wouldn't be caught out with an AOL email address.) It wasn't long, though, before there were reasons to be resentful.

First among them was this ill-conceived (and thankfully short-lived) idea that we should all be using AOL for out inter-office e-mail. (I imagine AOL had an idea that they could offer this as a service to the corporate world, and forcing their own employees to use it was the way to smooth out the rough edges.) For security reasons, we would all be provided with an electronic device (it was commonly referred to as a "key fob") which would generate an ever-changing sequence of numbers, a code we'd need to be able to login to our accounts. (I found an article about all this here.) You know, I honestly don't remember if we ever did use them.

And not only was using AOL slow and cumbersome, it was also ad-supported ― which meant that every time we accessed our e-mail we'd have to see paid advertising. I complained bitterly about that.

In fact, I remember being so resentful at having to use AOL that I installed an alternative program, Claris Emailer, which could access AOL's mail service. This was the sort of stuff that irritated the IT Department no end (one of a long, long list of transgressions I was responsible for through the years), but I was not going to give in without a fight.

In all, I don't think this endeavor lasted more than a few weeks before everything returned to the way it was. (It would be the first of many, many failures in the AOL Time Warner merger.)