More AOL Stalking

Anyone who’s ever used AOL knows that they don’t let you choose how or what software is installed, that they won’t let you opt out of “advertising updates”, won’t let you cancel, and on top of that, that they literally won’t let you uninstall the software.

One perfect example of this stalkerish desire to keep you in their abusive grasp forever is this crap. To save you having to click through I’m reprinting the page for your viewing displeasure. All bolding/italicizing/all-capping is my own. This, by the way, is why I wrote a tutorial about how to uninstall the adapter, so you can actually get rid of the thing once you cancel AOL.

AOL Gambling on Bettors and McAfee

There’s days when so much bad news floats around about AOL that I want to write about cheerful things instead…like sunsets. How about an article on sunsets? Anybody? This is one of those days.

For instance, someone needs to hand AOL the Dumbass Award of 2007 for dropping Kaspersky’s Active Virus Shield from their lineup of free anti-virus tools. It’s a bit of a resource hog, but it’s probably the most effective anti-virus product out there, and it has a firewall, incoming and outgoing IP logging, and a few other cool features.

Please God, Just One More Bad Year

Time to watch the ship start sinking; AOL can’t bail out much longer. Breaking news at the Washington Post quotes Rob Enderle, a principal analyst for the Enderle Group, saying that unless AOL becomes more competitive, “this property will be without value by this time next year.”

AOL had it’s worst quarter since changing it’s business model last summer to regain money lost from over 14 million fleeing subscribers. Giving away free access to AOL’s software and premium content while attaching ads to member’s inboxes and emails was supposed to staunch the painful flow of lost dollars. For a while the ad-based model seemed to have some hope. AOL claimed profits rose around 40% for each subsequent quarter, but profit rose just 16% last quarter, and past examination proves most of the increase was from advertising.com, an AOL subsidiary that places ads on third-party websites, not on AOL’s.