Enough with the lemons, you two.
- When AOL opened in Australia[1] it found itself in a generally high-quality market and had to pull its socks up quite a bit before it began to acquire a decent amount of market share
- Yes, the AOL client has a history of stomping all over the network stack and not playing nice with other semi-proprietary dial-up clients. However, I do recall a few comments over the years from various US mags[2] about how over time the AOL client became nicer. ISTR that there was a major improvement in that arena with a major version change and a lot of problems along the lines of "it wrecked my dial-up with such-and-such!" were met with "upgrade to the newer AOL client".
- I have spoken to a local AOL support tech on behalf of an (ex-)emploter's client. The question I had was reasonably technical and was to do with FTP running under AOL. The guy who answered knew exactly what I was talking about - including the right answer.
- And lastly, surely you both know that Microsoft has successfully taught tens of millions of consumers that computers are non-deterministic and often unreliable? This would be why, if AOL is as shitty as people say it is, many subscribers simply put up with it.
Wade.
[1] No, they aren't "Australia On-Line", and nor are they (confusingly) "America On-Line". They are just "AOL".
[2] e.g. Byte.
