On the Soapbox

You'd think that with a brand name with such wide recognition, AOL could use it to attract new broadband users to their broadband service. Verizon, Earthlink, and others have all managed to successfully convert their previously dialup-heavy services into broadband. Well, there has always been the overpricing issue, but I think that the problem may lie with their technology.

Take for example, their most popular service: AIM. I haven't been using the official AIM client in eons; I have long since converted to the Windows version of Gaim. Up to right before the latest version of AIM Triton, AIM has always had a less-than-spectacular interface. You'd think that in this day in age, a company as big as AOL could make a better interface that doesn't look like it was hastily ported from Windows 3.1. Well, they did make a new interface, which they officially rolled out of beta last December as Triton, and for the first time today, I tried out AIM Triton. Admittedly, it looks a bit better, but that's not saying much, and that is about as far as my praise will go. The installation size is much bigger, and BTW, thanks for the littering of my system with "Try AOL" icons, the attempts to make AOL Explorer the default browser, and the attempts to set AOL as my default homepage. And why on Earth do I now have AOL Explorer on my computer? It's just Internet Explorer wrapped in an AOL interface, except the interface is sluggish and the entire browser is, mysteriously, excruciatingly slow, unresponsive, and CPU-hungry, which is made worse by the fact that it auto-starts when I sign into AIM. Oh, and I apparently can't uninstall it without uninstalling AIM. And then there's the buddy list, more colorful and flashy than ever, with distracting animated ads that can sometimes eat up quite a few CPU cycles. Did I mention the AOL anti-spyware software (which I had no idea was even included) that suddenly popped up a window asking me if I wanted to scan my system when I was in the middle of something else?

In the end, I think that this Washington Post review of Triton sums up the problems surprisingly well. Another example that might be worth looking at is Netscape 8, which is based on Firefox. It successfully turned a clean, friendly browser into a bloated, flashy, and distracting monstrosity complete with unwanted plugs for AOL. If Triton, Netscape 6/7/8, and even AOL's old IM software is to be any indicator of AOL's software quality in general, I am not surprised why they are sinking. They should learn from Google and the early incarnations of Yahoo! (before they too started down dark path of clutterness) and recognize that there is merit in the cliché of the customer always being right. Google Talk, for example, is fast, responsive, small in size, free of distracting animated ads, free of useless and distracting clutter, and in a word, clean. Even Gaim, whose performance suffers somewhat on Windows because its native environment is Linux, is faster, lighter, and more responsive than Triton. Google's homepage is refreshingly spartan while AOL's is visually noisy, contains Flash, and slow to load. Finally, when you install a Google product, it doesn't try to take over your machine and dump a dozen icons pointing you to other Google products. In the end, we all know which one is considered more lovable and which one has been more successful. It's time for AOL to recognize that marketing is not always the best way to do long-term brand investment, especially when this results in marketing doing the software engineering; brand investment comes first and foremost from product quality.

I'll stick with Gaim and Google Talk (only because Gaim has yet to implement voice chat). Oh, and thank goodness for virtualization, which allows me to try software like Triton without polluting my real systems. :)