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. :)

PBS was supposed to air new some new Monty Python specials this spring. Well, according to the local listings, my local PBS is not airing them. WTF? Even the station in Kansas City is airing them. Grrr. So what are they showing tonight here? "Great Scenic Railway Journeys" You've gotta be kidding me.

In other news, there will be six editions of Windows Vista. Yikes. Which sorta reminds me of this hilarious video clip (it's less than 3 minutes long and definitely worth it).

Probably in response to the Domino's promotion in which you can buy three medium pizzas with unlimited toppings for $7 per pizza, Papa John's latest print ad features an identical deal: three medium pizzas with unlimited toppings for $20.99 total. Ah, the wonders of free-market competition... or so I thought. I hopped on over to Papa John's website, and on the order placement page, it lists the advertised special: "Three Medium. Unlimited Toppings. (Maximum five toppings per pizza) $20.99" Mmmkay, so right underneath the big prominent words "Unlimited Toppings" is fine print that defines unlimited as being limited to no more than five. Even more fishy is the fact that this fine print was conspicuously missing from their glossy print ad. Granted, it's still a good deal, but the advertising is clearly misleading: a limit of five is most definitely not "unlimited". There was other language that could have been used instead of "unlimited" that would not involve pulling a Clinton with definitions, and they could have at least added this fine print to the print ad instead of springing this detail when someone goes to order.

Yes, this is all very trivial, but it still pisses me off because one of the biggest reasons why free markets do not work like they do in textbooks is the problem of imperfect and asymmetric information, and this kind of deliberate attempt at information distortion that you see everywhere and every day is ruining the already soiled reputation of free markets.

The Economist posted an article (subscriber-only) a few days ago about the United States budget. Here are some excerpts:

George Bush's state-of-the-union address last week may have set a new standard for involuted meaning when he urged Congress to "act responsibly, and make the tax cuts permanent". At that time, the official White House projection of the budget deficit for the 2006 fiscal year was $341 billion, a substantial portion of which could have been erased by rolling back the tax cuts so dear to Mr Bush's heart. On Monday February 6th, the use of the word "responsibly" suddenly looked even more idiosyncratic, as the administration released a $2.7 trillion proposed budget, and announced that the 2006 deficit projection had grown to $423 billion, or 3.2% of America's GDP.

If a Republican Congress and president can only manage to cut their least favourite programmes by a paltry amount when faced with a budget deficit soaring towards the half-trillion mark, then it is time to concede defeat and raise taxes.

Bringing the budget back to balance will require a politically unpalatable combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

Here is a fairly libertarian news magazine advocating tax increases, but I think that it was being realistic about the issue. It concedes that if there is going to be a high level of spending (and it duly notes that the lion's share of the budget is taken up by military spending, debt interest, and health care, which are areas that cannot realistically be cut in the short-term), then it would be the responsible thing to do to raise taxes to cover this spending. This makes sense; taxes are born out of spending, not the other way around.

I was a bit surprised, however, at how negative some of the reactions that I read on the web were towards this notion of raising taxes. I guess this pretty much sums up what I mean when I tell people that I am a "moderate" libertarian and that I do not subscribe to everything that the Libertarian Party would subscribe to (one pet peeve of mine in regards to libertarian politics: cutting education spending; education is a public good in that it is necessary for democracy and, ironically, better education would bolster the the number of people who would subscribe to the aloof libertarian cause). Of course it would be great if the government does not spend so much money, but one has to be realistic: if the government is going to spend this money, then you had better raise taxes sooner or later. I guess "realistic" is the operative word; many of the hard-line libertarians that I have met are simply not that realistic.

Anyway, here is a great blog post (pretty humorous, too!) that I came across that discusses this issue.