Word: aol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Only in the digital age can an outfit go from worst to first so quickly. In the past 24 months, AOL has dodged everything from a Bill Gates bull rush (his Microsoft Network spent millions to compete with AOL) to a tussle with the Internet, whose wide-open spaces threatened to make AOL's narrower "gated community" irrelevant. Case, 39, has been famously (if inadvertently) self-destructive, infuriating AOL members by offering too little capacity and too many headaches. Overeager users have crashed parts of the service twice in the past year by bombarding it with more calls than computers...
Many of the same problems remain. AOL, which has always had a high turnover of subscribers, still serves for many as training wheels from which they eventually graduate by getting directly onto the Internet. Retaining customers will become even harder as phone companies, cable companies, Microsoft and Netscape make it even easier to use the Internet's open standards for browsing the Web, chatting and sending mail. AOL hopes the WorldCom deal will eventually allow it to offer higher-speed access through phone lines, but cable and wireless technologies could lure impatient users away from cumbersome dial-up services. Customers...
...WorldCom-CompuServe deal certified AOL as cyberspace's first true empire, a global online service that's adding 6,000 members a day and will soon be available in more than 100 countries. Revenues have pumped up with impressive speed, even for a high-tech firm, from $53 million in fiscal 1993 to nearly $2 billion this year. And, slowly, profits are emerging. The stock price, which traded at $22 a year ago, hit a high of $80.50 this week. Even at a perilous 80 times projected 1998 earnings, it will beat the market, think Wall Street pros. "AOL...
...built a business on the simple idea that the electronic world should be easy to use. "The geeks don't like us," Case said last week as he kicked back in his Dulles, Va., office, sporting a new green CompuServe shirt. "They want as much technology as possible, while AOL's entire objective is to simplify." It was Case, for instance, who introduced the first graphical interface to the online world in 1985, allowing users to point their mouse arrows at whatever they wanted and click...
Simplicity has let AOL build an electronic community that includes not only the geek next door but the geek's parents and grandparents as well. It's a place where a generation of Florida retirees has found that the keyword Jewish links to the "Ask a Rabbi" feature, where teens can buy MTV clothes and where Business Week and the New York Times come free with a subscription to AOL. (TIME is available on CompuServe; other Time Inc. publications are carried on AOL. Time Inc. has a joint venture with AOL to develop a health site called Thrive.) Case hopes...