I remember hearing a comedian say yrs. ago that nobody reads the National Inquirer, and yet they sell millions of copies each week. If anybody mentions an article fr.the NI, they always say, "I saw a copy at the salon" or "I was visiting my aunt and looked at her copy". Everybody hates on AOL, incl. me, quite often, but here it is 2009 and they are still around, albeit not the force they were 10 yrs. ago.
I have had a real love-hate relationship w. the company since joining about 8 yrs. ago. I could go on and on re. the good and bad of it, but will just provide a couple of pos. and neg. comments: I kinda liked how they flooded the stores w. free CD's for several yrs., so that wherever you shopped, you could always get a free CD, if the kids/dog/cat/ferret chewed up the one you got the wk. before. A few mos. ago, I needed to reinstall AOL on our old, dial-up use computer (yes, we now have high-speed access, and are working to update/upgrade our old puter to get it HSA usable), and after vainly looking for an old CD fr. them for a couple of wks., finally got them to send me one (prob. had to blow the dust off it at the warehouse). Agree w. others that the techs are limited (likely more by AOL policy than their individual expertise) to a few stale, middle-of-the-road, one-size-fits-all fixes, that sometimes do harm instead of good. If I were still paying $26/mo. for their service, I would have gone elsewhere, but at $11.99, I find their bells and whistles (esp. the incl. McAfee), and sub-to-semi-standard dial-up support (an ongoing complaint is they only seem to want to help w. very new puters) worth that much. The single biggest thing that impressed me re. AOL is that, several yrs. ago, they went after a major spammer and legally seized his assets, worth millions, and then held a sweepstakes drawing and gave the money to the winning AOL subscriber. one of their few class moves, IMHO, but very classy, in a day when most big corps. are grabbing for every buck, and keeping it. Will prob. keep using their service, and griping about it, for the foreseeable future. :-)
