I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people are calling to say "I called the local telecom and ordered DSL/Cable direct, close my account", they're trying to negotiate customer retention from the back foot.

I know plenty of people held onto AOL for a long time because of specific communities-- their chat service was more accessible than IRC, and as mentioned elsewhere, tying it to a bill and an identity was a good way to keep it from getting too toxic.

My family held out until 2006 or so because of one such community. We were willing to put up with 56k slowness until I got a webdev position and needed the ability to do work-from-home with a reasonable turnaround.

There was a definite point though where you could tell they had decided to give up on investment. The client was ever buggier and weirder, they stopped offering Usenet, and their internal forum system got retooled in a way that nobody really liked. I suspect at the end, the chat service was probably their last moat for their userbase.

Why didn't you just keep AOL for the chat thing, and use broadband for everything else? I'm sure it wouldn't have been that much.

Though what allowed cable/DSL companies to move into the ISP business was the complete decoupling of content from access. In 1991, when there was no practical WWW and you navigated a bunch of proprietary content by typing in AOL keywords, a cable company would've had to implement a full graphical browser and a large library of content to be useful. By 1998, when we had Netscape and IE and Yahoo and millions of websites, those industries were all disaggregated and we just needed the pipes.

There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.

Don't forget they bought Time Warner including their cable TV/Internet operation. Say what you will about the service itself, but as a business, they did pretty well.

I feel AOL failed because of managment period.

I never understood what they did with all those programmers.

I'm not in favor of hiring a CEO just because they kinda looked good on paper. I won't even mention the person's name, and don't blame it all on that person. Amazon was a slow sinking ship.

At the management level their where many issues to blame the original folks for it though is blind… Steve’s brother dies of brain cancer. The market crashed causing all the time Warner execs to go ape shit on losing their cash bonuses in favor of worthless stocks that had been the primary motivator… combined with the market changes in broadband… and yeah 12 years of growth turned negative in what felt like overnight - hindsight a million things could have been handled better. Best anyone can do is learn and do better which IMO is exactly what Facebook, google and Amazon have been doing …

AOL is the reason I got broadband. I tried to cancel and they gave me 6 free months of high-speed to stay with them, with a recurring rate that was $10 more than the provider who delivered the high-speed to my house.

After the 6 months was up, I cancelled AOL and stayed with the provider.