Big boys on the Net out of touch with their clients
It seems like America Online - once the favourite alternative to CompuServe in the days before the explosion of interest in the Internet - has been having a really bad year.
It has faced everything from a lawsuit filed when a stock feed misquoted a company's share price by a factor of 10 to outraged customers unable to connect to the network and receive e-mail after the firm could no longer cope with the number of subscribers using its service.
Now it is under fire once again for what amounts to a terrible public relations gaffe on the part of the company.
The story is this.
America Online had been planning to release information about its subscribers to telemarketers at the end of July, and this outraged its users.
Apparently, the firm changed its policies, allowing it to sell the names to specific companies with whom it has strategic partnerships.
It posted this change to the forum housing the company's terms of services.
But it did nothing to actively inform the service's eight million users.
Most customers were blissfully unaware of the proposed change in policy at America Online.
Once this came to light, however, users sent outraged messages to the company which immediately announced that it had decided to backtrack and not sell the subscriber list to the telemarketing companies.
Granted, the company immediately changed its plans when it became clear the move did not sit well with its customers.
Nonetheless, it makes one wonder if the firm is at all sensitive to its customers' opinions. After facing a lawsuit and disgruntled users who have suffered inconvenience and possibly lost business as a result of the service's much-publicised technical difficulties, one would think the company would tread carefully with every move which affects its customers.
Instead, its actions seem to be an attempt to slip a very significant change of policy past its users.
This can serve only to further damage the firm's reputation and its attractiveness as an easy way to get on-line.
In fact, this reinforces the notion held by many Internet users that the old, proprietary on-line services such as America Online and CompuServe are hopelessly out of touch with the emerging cyber-society and Internet culture and, as such, are doomed to slow and somewhat painful deaths.
This view from the Internet may be extreme, but America Online does seem to be fulfilling some of these prophecies.
The surprising thing, though, is that the firm's user-base has grown over the past two years and may well grow again this year.
This is attributable to the one thing which makes CompuServe and America Online preferable to standard Internet service provider connections to the Internet - ease of use.
It is much easier to install America Online's software and get on-line than to try to configure dial-up PPP in Windows 95.
And it is this which will allow the firm to overcome its problems and to continue to survive.
Once all forms of Internet access become equally simple, though . . .
