Screaming Penguin

If you aren't scared after hearing about the merger of AOL and Time Warner, your coma may be irreversible. So what do you get when you merge the two juggernaughts? You get an even bigger, slower to innovate monster company that will not offer anything useful to you or I. Not that the company won't be successful, it is in fact that they will be successful that is alarming. AOL caters to the lowest common denominator of users. They forsake innovation in order to supposedly make their product easier to use. If you have used AOL's ftp client you are among the technical elite. It's twice as difficult as using the command line. When AOL released version 5.0 did they improve their FTP client. No, they frankly stated that they wanted to limit interface changes as to not confuse long time users. The same story goes with their e-mail interface. There were hardly any new features, even in areas like automatic uudecoding which other mail clients support seamlessly and that novice users wouldn't even notice (except in the absence of the feature).The merger does have value for AOL users of course. AOL now controls some major cable companies, allowing it to break into the Fast Access market that threatened to steal from their enormous market share. AOL also gets quality content from sources like CNN and Time Magazine. But what do non-aol users get. We get to watch news stories on CNN that constantly interrupt, "For more info use AOL Keyword: Suckme". We have to hope the cable modem providers allow competitive alternatives to AOL as your ISP.The only real potential benefit of the merger lies in the possible advancements in interactive television. I would trust AOL much more than Microsoft to install crap on my TV. I have used AOL for almost 10 years and never had an unrecoverable error. I haven't had to re-install the software seventeen times and I don't have to constantly watch out for security bulletins and service packs. AOL tries to focus on stability rather than adding new features, something that Microsoft hasn't quite learned to do. Although Microsoft is ahead of the game with their PCTV OS 'enhancements', AOL could quickly gain that market share. It would be similar to the Instant Messanger wars, but with more at stake. Their are probably more AOL IM users that MSN IM users, even though MS's client is more robust and usable. Oh well, we lose either way. What the hell happened to Netscape, a company we all could root for?   AOL