Synopsis
This tells of how Steve Case beat Bill Gates, nailed the Netheads, and made millions in the war for the Web.'
From the Publisher
The first inside account of what goes on at America OnlineEvery so often, an entire industry is created from almost nothing, capturing the imagination of millions of consumers, while setting off a titanic clash for money, power, and dominance among major corporations. Such has been the case with the Internet and the online services industry since its mainstream emergence in the early 1990s. And of the many companies vying to create empires in cyberspace, none is now better known than America Online.
Like Coca-Cola to soda drinkers or Kleenex to snifflers, AOL has become the brand name of this emerging medium. In aol.com, Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher draws on her unprecedented access to provide an insider's account of how a small computer games service became a multibillion-dollar powerhouse serving more than 12 million subscribers. "This is a remarkable story of entrepreneurship, of hard-won victories and flat-footed stumbles, of the unusual and complex people who have worked to create a part of this incredible new communications medium," says Swisher, who covered AOL and the Internet for The Washington Post from 1994-97.
Going beyond the headlines, Swisher puts readers in the passenger seat of one of the most gut-wrenching roller coaster rides any company has ever taken. Among its many valleys: the 1996 19-hour service outage that infuriated customers, and the precipitous stock drop that cut AOL's market value by two-thirds. Among the peaks: only 18 months later, when the number of subscribers reached an astounding 11 million and the company earned $20.8 million on revenues of $592 million.
And yet, throughout its history, AOL has repeatedly been written off by the media and countless high-tech experts. Led by dogged CEO Steve Case, an unlikely captain of industry, the company has survived bitter challenges from Microsoft, CompuServe, Prodigy, and even the Christian Right.
Swisher illustrates how, in the 1980s, such forward-thinking companies as CompuServe, CBS, Sears, IBM, Apple, and Knight-Ridder newspapers were slow! to understand this new technology's potential and unwilling to fund its development. "As difficult as it is to imagine, as late as 1992, there was no commercial Internet, no World Wide Web," she notes. "And few -- especially investment houses -- had any true belief in consumer networking as anything more than a fad, much like CB radios."
Often accused of having the same insular hubris that plagued Apple and IBM, AOL has been criticized as heedless with its customers and business practices. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars blanketing America with its software disks. Its technical glitches and lapses in customer service have been almost unforgivable. Yet as Swisher demonstrates, it is precisely because of AOL's loose corporate culture, prophetic timing, and alliances with unlikely partners that it has become the industry leader. Above all, the key to its success has been Case's vision of what an online service could be -- not just a shopping center or a business tool, but a real community.
Swisher exposes numerous inside stories about how AOL:
@ survived an early hostile takeover bid by Paul Allen and a less hostile one by Microsoft.
@ pulled off a surprise double-deal in Web browsers to offer customers both Netscape's Navigator and and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
@ carried out a highly memorable, risky, and innovative branding campaign by carpet-bombing America with more than 250 million free disks.
@ deals with the problem of "churn" -- new members using their free time, then canceling without paying a dime for the service.
@ regained its position after the 1996 restating of financial results that wiped out all the profits AOL ever made.
@ grew its usage from 46 million hours to 125 million hours in a five month period from September 1996 to February 1997, creating thorny access problems.
@ reacted when thousands of customers threatened to desert AOL when asked to limit their "unlimited" use, and again when AOL planned to release! client data to telemarketers.
@ deals with the tricky issues of privacy and freedom of speech in cyberspace.
According to Swisher, Case made a brilliant move by recruiting MTV founder Bob Pittman to become president and second-in-command, thereby positioning AOL at the forefront of the next wave of new media and information services. But the big question remains: Is AOL going to last? "The truth is: nobody knows," Swisher concludes. "In the spanking new world of the Internet, nobody knows at all because everyone and everything has just been born."
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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