When was aol started

Who owns AOL Mail? Under hisleadership, the company invested in media brands andadvertising technologies. Yamara Greenhut Explainer. What does AOL mean? America Online, Inc.

Adalberta Alberte Explainer. Who was the founder of AOL? Steve Case. Maricica Goken Explainer. What was the first Internet provider? The first ISP for the Internet we know anduse today is considered to be "The World" who started servingcustomers in Chu Francas Pundit. Where is AOL headquarters? New York, NY. Magencio Santamaria Pundit. What is AOL email address?

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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. When did AOL start offering Internet email? Ask Question. Asked 8 months ago. Active 8 months ago. Thus, a business strategy was born. We knew we couldn't win by outspending the competition, so we had to come up with another approach. That approach wasn't enough to save Commodore, which went into decline and finally folded in April But with Kimsey as money man and president, Seriff in charge of technology, and Case handling marketing, Quantum crossed into the black in its second year of business.

New services emerged out of alliances with Apple, Tandy, and IBM, and in , the various offerings were folded together under the name America Online. In , management introduced a point-and-click interface for DOS users, and named Case president of the company. By the time AOL went public in , the upstart had built a membership more than , strong.

But the company really took off the following year, thanks in part to a huge miscalculation by one of its larger rivals: faced with rising costs and mounting losses, Prodigy abandoned its flat-fee structure and raised its rates, infuriating its 2. America Online won. While Prodigy foundered and CompuServe slept, AOL offered improved Internet access and beat them to market with a Windows interface, adding hundreds of thousands of new subscribers in the process.

AOL's rivals later added those features, but Case and company had all the momentum, which they took advantage of by pursuing alliances with big-time media companies eager to get in on the cyberspace craze. America Online offered its new partners a way to make a little money while experimenting with the medium. AOL not only obtained loads of new content but also subsidized ads and access to customer lists for its direct-marketing efforts; all this in return for a small percentage of user fees and royalties based on new subscribers.

Wired has had a presence on AOL since It hasn't all been smooth sailing. Hypergrowth has periodically overwhelmed America Online's system capacity, resulting in endless busy signals, frozen screens, and e-mail that could take longer to deliver than the US Postal Service.

Frustrated subscribers even endowed the company with a new nickname: America On Hold. Not exactly the user-friendly image Case has worked so hard to project. Still, most members seem willing to cut AOL some slack. And rather than threatening to kick complainers off the service whenever something has gone wrong - as Prodigy did after the pricing fiasco two years ago - Case has publicly apologized and moved quickly to deal with the situation.

The software glitches that were making the system crawl are fixed, Case insists, and the new high-speed network the company is building should eliminate the access problem once and for all.

But he concedes that finding the right balance remains a challenge. But we can do both. The capacity problems might indeed be a thing of the past, observers say, but not necessarily because of any major improvements in AOL technology. The fundamental question facing America Online is not whether it can keep up with excessive demand in the future.

It's whether there's going to be any demand at all. And consumers didn't have much choice where they wanted to go for an easy service. But now that's going to change. And no doubt about it, some powerful rivals are out to eat AOL's lunch. First of all, the company's traditional competitors are finally waking up.

CompuServe bought Spry Inc. Prodigy beat the com-petition to market with a Web browser, announced plans to ditch its clunky interface, and hired Ed Bennett, the Viacom executive who once ran the cable channel VH-1, to hip up the service. Even the smaller players - Delphi, GEnie, and eWorld - are joining the battle for a piece of the action, with all three planning to upgrade their offerings in the coming months.

Still, Case can probably deal with those guys; after all, he's been beating the pants off them for years now. Case and his team built America Online by offering users a bundled service: network access, interface, and content are presented in a single package. Based on how long members spend in each content provider's area, AOL's partners get paid generally 10 to 20 percent of revenues. These partners also receive a "bounty" for subscriptions that results from their marketing efforts on AOL's behalf.

The new competitors are attacking that model at its core, offering users potentially cheaper access and enticing content providers with the chance to make a lot more money than they're getting out of Case.

And none is doing it more aggressively than - Surprise! Too easy, according to Steve Case. Analysts at market research firm International Data Corp. He argues that the relationship between the PC and the operating system is akin to that of the telephone and the dial tone. Washington may be listening. The Justice Department already struck a blow at the service by derailing Microsoft's merger with Intuit; with its home-banking potential, Quicken could have been the killer app that made the network invinc-ible.

Flush with victory, the trust busters are now looking at the service itself. Whatever the legal outcome, The Microsoft Network promises to be a for-midable rival for America Online.

Microsoft's strategy: lure users and content providers with an "a la carte" service that minimizes connect-time charges. Microsoft is expected to charge around four dollars a month for basic services like e-mail, chat, Internet access, and some news. While it remains unclear how much extra independently generated content will cost, content providers will receive at least 70 percent of whatever they earn, however they earn it. And to the degree that you make money, either by selling advertising or by selling goods or by charging customers, you keep most of it.

Despite the prospect of all those bodies on which to experiment, The Microsoft Network's content providers so far consist mainly of computing companies offering tech support, an assortment of obscure information providers, and a few consumer outfits like QVC and Kodak.

But in what could be a glimpse of things to come, NBC recently became the first big media name to bail on America Online and enter into an exclusive relationship with Microsoft. If the attraction of The Microsoft Network isn't strong enough to lure away AOL's users and partners, there's a more tantalizing suitor waiting down the road: the Internet itself. With the advent of the World Wide Web, as Forrester Research analyst Mary Modahl points out, standard technologies make it possible to unbundle the three components of an online service - network, interface, and content - allowing companies to compete at each level.

That should result in lower access prices, better interfaces, and, most ominously, content providers abandoning AOL for the Web. At present, AOL's interface limits the ability of its partners to promote their own brand names.

The reason is that AOL's user interface is the main determinant of the way content looks. Most of AOL's big partners already have their own home pages. Though few have figured out how to make Web sites pay, they are testing the waters.

Steve Case doesn't buy it. While publishers may hope they'll be able to charge for their services on an a la carte basis, Case says, his 10 years of experience with the consumer mind-set tells him that the key 93 percent of unconnected households aren't likely to go along. Just look at cable TV. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance.

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