Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is nothing compared to what they missed on email. They could easily have made aol mail free and still kept charging for the client. Ted Leonsis admitted at a meeting once that this was his largest regret.

Is there a an established term for this already? If not I'd like to call it stock market disease due to the usual reason for it.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund Norges is starting to encourage companies to adopt very long term time horizons for equity awards and to move away from the specific, complex performance-vesting plans most US companies rely on today, though most institutional investors and companies are skeptical of that approach.

That is logical; however afaik there is almost no data to indicate magnitude of CEO pay is an indicator of company performance. I would bet you that long-horizon-tied CEO compensation would be correlated, though.

they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?

I think this statement misleads readers.

Was there organizational stupidity? Always, in every organization. What kept AOL from capitalizing on messaging and social media was lock-in to the subscriber business model, which when combined with market defined quarter-to-quarter EBIDTA driven board goals did not permit leaping at what the people at the core of the (AIM) business knew were the possibilities.

About the only thing they could have reasonably got away with would have been some kind of spin-out, which was always opposed by the subscriber revenue side's logic. Guess what: the folks with the multi-billion $ revenue stream win those arguments.

So, not stupid. Bound by the market and biz model, and not managed by suicidal execs. So in the long run it took folks with tens of billions of dollars of private risk money to take that leap.

I get that the people with power may have maximized their personal short-term financial outcomes. Which is certainly one way to define smart. But it strikes me as a very narrow one.

Look at Bezos, for example. He's spent the last couple of decades mostly ignoring what investors wants on a quarterly basis. And Amazon's gone from strength to strength because of it. If AOL's execs were smart, then that makes Bezos stupid. If that's the case, I guess I'd rather be dumb.

The execs are probably not as happy as the investors, but they are still somewhat isolated from the fate of each individual company via their golden parachutes, and they can find jobs as experienced execs in some other company.

I think their unique culture has declined over time, but it was still powerful enough to give us the Prius. Now ubiquitous, at the time, it was revolutionary.

Also, I'm not sure that Wall Street had much influence on Toyota. I can't easily tell when they first listed on US markets, but it was long after their company culture was set.

What is more surprising is that our attachment to institutions includes for-profit businesses. Really, we should, as customers/consumers, just go with the best service, but culturally we can't help but think that something is lost when an old, useless company goes away.

Ultimately, in the context ans scope they are made, they are probably great decisions. However, reality is more far reaching.

Tangentially, publicly-traded companies are strongly incentivized to keep growing at all costs until they collapse under their own weight, rather than just finding a market and serving it well year after year. I dunno if capitalism is to blame specifically, but it certainly seems perverse.

Contrast this with communism, be where we'd all just be forced by law to use whatever AOL gave us, forever.

But it is still sad to see something that was such an important part of internet culture and history die like this.

But perhaps that is just the nostalgia speaking.

I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.

(Although AIM itself started as kind of a unwanted skunkworks project, when there was an off the shelf solution available, people weren't that driven to build their own)

Mattermost today is extremely competitive with Slack.

Mattermost's clients are awful. Just awful. The phone apps are effectively unusable (incredibly buggy and suck down battery like no tomorrow), and the desktop electron app is a complete hog. It doesn't even handle its faux tabs properly (takes half a second to switch, and it resets the position to the end every time you change a tab, which is... dumb), and the scrollback handles high-volume channels very poorly (I have to click "Load more messages" at least 20x times every time I want to scroll back to the beginning of the day). Now imagine every time you switch tabs you have to click "Load more messages" a bunch of times to see earlier messages because it resets when you switched tabs.

If this is the future of messaging, then holy shit. It's almost a parody.

I'd like Mattermost to succeed. But it needs to do a lot of catching up still.

I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.

When the CEO controls a lot of the stock, they seem to care a lot less about quarterly results, whereas when the CEO gets most of their money from bonuses tied to stock growth, that is when you see most of these games.

If that's true, it seems the lesson here is to give your CEO a bunch of stock instead of a bonus based on stock performance?

Agreed, once the original vision is gone something else takes its place and it is just a ghost of what it was.

This goes hand in hand with the owners/founders being more focused on product development, engineering and innovation. Engineering and innovation are costly when marketing or bizdev/accounting/metrics runs your company which typically happens when the founder leaves. Engineering takes a back seat to decision making, marketing tries to pump revenue out of a product that may be successful not but is not being iterated or innovated on, or the next big thing is not worked on because the company is fat and happy until the grace from that innovation runs out. People join during times of success to latch on and cash out, when the hard work of innovating comes along, those people are gone.

Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google win because they are willing to take innovative risks, engineering is not in the back seat but a driving force and they invest most of their profits back into more innovation, Amazon is probably the best out there at this. Microsoft used to be as well and is coming back a bit but they fell into the trap above when Ballmer took over for a while, more focused on revenues and metrics than the next big step which will always put the current players out of business, or missing a step, if they don't adapt.

What's your threat model?

What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient?

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/

https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...

We should be encouraging people to select passwords that they can't rememeber so that they are then encouraged to generate them with a tool (my favorite being KeePass).

Longer passwords let you optimize passwords for ease of recall and security, rather than fitting in arbitrary requirements.

There were no duplicates in any of the 50 sets. (About a week's runtime on a fairly modest Intel processor.)

Given that 100m accounts is a fair fraction of the world's active computer users, that's a pretty good start.

(There are further reasons for finding passwords alone insufficient for security, but at least these are strong, and yet potentially memorable, passwords.)

EDIT: Well, with the exception of your password manager one, if not using biometrics.

You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.

I left in 2016 and in practice we just didn't use email at all because it was so painful to use.

a) Employees of yahoo using gmail for personal purposes?

b) Yahoo, the company, uses gmail

c) @yahoo.com will be powered by gmail in the future as a white labeled product?

(Each of the above is alarming in it's own way)

I think a vast majority of companies would fire (at least, call it out as against policy) if you just went ahead and used gmail for work emails because the official one is crappy.

Man, that would be an absolute disaster. I have so many contacts who I can only through Yahoo and AOL email addresses. I guess I should reach out to all of them before they are disappeared. ;- )

Goes to show that big corps often have no clue how to deal with their offerings.

Source: I worked on AIM for iPhone.

IMO AIM struggled because: - it was a highly tuned, specialized C backend, and it never migrated to something that could be improved easily. - backend technical challenges (as well as legal issues) made storing chat history very difficult - Hardly any info was collected about AIM screennames, so it was hard to build a social graph from it - AIM registration was the same as AOL signup, and that registration process was very cumbersome, imo. - Most AIM accounts had no email address associated with them, so it was impossible to do password resets, for all the locked up AIM screennames.

As a client developer on AIM, it was hard to make a material improvement to AIM, though we certainly did try

In fact many people think google's failure with gchat was trying to force people to use things they didn't want when all they really wanted was simple chat.

Wait ... what? Who came up with the idea of hosting your email with your competitor?

If I remember correctly, Yahoo used to have an email service.

What happened to eating your own dogfood?