expertSEM

While working from home today, I attempted to log on to AOL’s popular AIM program in order to discuss ongoing business with my colleagues at work. Over the past few weeks, every time I have started AOL, a message from the administrators has told me to upgrade. I ignored this message under my default “if it ain’t broke…” decision making criteria. However, this morning the “ask me later” option was no longer available. It turns out, they wouldn’t let me use AIM unless I upgraded to their new system. The thought of re-installing Trillian once again crossed my mind, but they too are always trying to get you to upgrade to the paid version so you can use smileys =)

Reluctantly, I hit the upgrade button, and waited. Then Firefox crashed. Upon restart, AOL had changed my homepage, installed the AIM search bar as a plug in, and switched my default search engine to that bastion of credible search results, Search.AOL.com (enhanced by Google!). It took me about ten minutes to reset my homepage, strip out the search bar, and revert my default search back to Google (I like my data straight from the horse’s mouth).

This gets at the core difference between my unabashed favorite search technology purveyor, and marginally consumer hostile companies like AOL. AOL tries to dictate your internet experience using their (economically influenced) ideas of what they think you would like. In the case of AOL, they thought I would like a hotlink to TMZ.com in my search bar so I could find all the latest celebrity scandals. They also thought I might like to know that bangs are back in! It is one thing if you are going to try and steer someone’s internet experience, quite another when you presume that they are all celebrity obsessed simpletons.

Don’t get me wrong, AIM is a great product, opening up a new form of communication to the masses for both business and personal use. It’s free, it’s useful, and in its simplicity, it remains superior to many other IM formats. But AOL oversteps. They could make plenty of money serving ads on AIM and orchestrating an adservice system based on personal information from AIM and using sites with participating cookies. But they don’t, they make their business plan intrusive and annoying, and it turns off users like me. Maybe that’s not important, and for every tech savvy user they turn off, they get ten others to keep AIMtoday.com as their homepage. That’s a risky calculus that I don’t give much chance of long term success, but hey, it’s only the stockholder’s money.

The final coup de grace was that within 5 minutes of installing these upgrades, a new AOL window popped up, “would you like to install the new security updates for AIM?”.

No, I’ve had my fill of you knuckleheads today, I’m going to blog about how I despise what you do instead.