Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

AOL is perhaps one of the most painful companies to watch in existence.  I've never used them and never intend to.  However, they've done so much harm to many businesses that I'm hoping that someone pulls the plug on them.  When Netscape was launched, it was revered as the best browser around, right up until version 4.0.  Sometime around that point AOL bought them out and they quietly subsided until the Mozilla code was released.  Originally, I kinda looked at it the same way that Fedora is RedHat's testing ground.  However, Mozilla/Firefox really took off within the past few years while Netscape just floundered.

I can't say that I'm said for Netscape's death as they really weren't producing anything noteworthy in the past few years.  Their portal site, browser and Digg clones have all been failures, so it isn't a surprise that AOL let them go.

That said, I put all the blame for Netscape's lack of success from AOL's continuing business failures.  The Time/Warner merger was flawed from the start and destroyed  WCW back when it was hot.  Later AOL stopped supporting in earnest Netscape and even WinAmp, one of the best media players up until that time.  It's as though anytime sometime arrives at some level of success, company politics kill projects in AOL.  Even their sales flops with the controversial situation where the guy wasn't allowed to cancel his contract further demonstrates AOL's lack of commitment to quality and customer satisfaction.

Well, despite their empire from years ago, the growth of broadband has killed AOL's primary business of dial up.  Hopefully, this makes them attractive as a buy for a company like Google, who will in turn just shut them off, showing the world that karma is, indeed, a muthafucking bitch.  After such a buyout, Google should fire all those executives and make the remaining dial up free while refocusing AOL's core business into free cable/internet access, thus challenging the telecoms in their monopoly.