AOL's Free CD Campaign Was Anything But Cheap
- Thread starter vansau
- Start date
aol is a huge rippoff. i have several friends and family are really struggling with having them stop billing us. after several long calls with them weve told them we are no longer subscribing they say ok they will cancel our subscription but sure enough the next month we will recieve a charge from them on our credit cards. this went unnoticed for three years. and they are still refusing to stop charging us long after we have stopped using dialup
I'm amazed that worked. I always assumed they would refuse service to anyone who tried to sign up more than once.sheic99 said:
While I am not a fan of heavy-handed litigation, I would love to see you and everyone else they have been essentially scamming over the years file some massive class-action suit against them, to the point where they have to go out of business. We weren't so unlucky ? we managed to get the free service out of them and cancel before the charges started, in fact ? but boy did they make it hard.GameSlave15 said:
Ah, my first - entirely crap - taste of the internet was via one of them ... we took the free trial period and never went back.
My uncle still uses them, I wonder if they're still as bad as their infamously awful late-90s period, the sheer horror stories of which alone convinced me never to go near them?
Still got a number of reformatted ex-AOL floppies hanging around, and probably even a couple of CDs lost in the piles in the cupboard (though most went in the bin as soon as they arrived ... we don't have a cat, and we already have plentiful real coasters).
The memory stick idea WOULD be a good one, as it would create a bit more brand awareness and even affection (?) and you can fit an awful lot of software into 32mb (or even 16) if you try, but there's a few problems with that now ---
1. Cost. Even the cheapest flashdrive requires far more material and manufacturing than a simple CD. You may be able to get them for $5 a time, or even $2.50, but the fact of a pressed CD plus cardboard slipcase probably costing $0.25 makes a hell of a difference when you send out hundreds of thousands of the things (floppies would have been about the same, bought in bulk). Plus they have to have the data slowly written onto them, which a pressed disc doesn't. They'd also end up coming under WEEE regulations (as they contain a PCB) - you may be able to throw out a (biodegradable??) plastic and aluminium-foil CD with reasonable impunity, but legally speaking AOL themselves have to take back the sticks for disposal. EXPENSIVE! And a logistical and legal nightmare.
(The cost factor is probably why they didn't send out CDRWs instead of CDs...)
2. Security and brand image. There's not a lot you can fit on a floppy in terms of gore-porn or whatever, but a flash drive is ripe for it. Viruses etc as well are a much bigger problem now. You let something rewritable out there into the public domain, particularly on an in-store display, with your company name printed all over it and an encouragement for people to stick it in their PC? You're just asking for trouble. I could probably fill something like that full of trojans and horse wang using my symbian phone and an adaptor plug, FFS. OK, they could use ROMs, but those things are hellish expensive to manufacture and high-capacity ones are only used where there is a good reason something else can't be.
(again, another reason they didn't use CDRWs ... floppies had to do because they were the only practical medium available at the time - but even so, I'm pretty sure most discs I received from AOL, or any other company putting a label with their name on, were supplied Read-Only with the write-protect tab entirely missing. Simple matter to put a bit of masking tape around it, but at least they tried)
3. Internet content delivery. Where do you get most of your software from these days? Over the wire. Physical media is dying out for those purposes for all except dedicated games consoles, and even they have a large amount of internet downloaded software. Most computers come with built-in TCP/IP stacks, networking drivers, and web browsers. All you need to give your potential (modem-based) users is a phone number to call - or even to dial into - where they'll speak to someone or interact with a webpage that'll take their payment details and tell them the four or five edit boxes they need to type stuff into to get it all working. More commonly, these days getting online requires either a physical broadband hookup to be installed, or an ADSL filter on your end and some config changes made at the phone company/ISP... it's not just as simple as hooking up your modem and inserting a disc. There's a process that has to be gone through. Better to just give out a cheap pamphlet that lays out what needs done, and who to call.
My uncle still uses them, I wonder if they're still as bad as their infamously awful late-90s period, the sheer horror stories of which alone convinced me never to go near them?
Still got a number of reformatted ex-AOL floppies hanging around, and probably even a couple of CDs lost in the piles in the cupboard (though most went in the bin as soon as they arrived ... we don't have a cat, and we already have plentiful real coasters).
The memory stick idea WOULD be a good one, as it would create a bit more brand awareness and even affection (?) and you can fit an awful lot of software into 32mb (or even 16) if you try, but there's a few problems with that now ---
1. Cost. Even the cheapest flashdrive requires far more material and manufacturing than a simple CD. You may be able to get them for $5 a time, or even $2.50, but the fact of a pressed CD plus cardboard slipcase probably costing $0.25 makes a hell of a difference when you send out hundreds of thousands of the things (floppies would have been about the same, bought in bulk). Plus they have to have the data slowly written onto them, which a pressed disc doesn't. They'd also end up coming under WEEE regulations (as they contain a PCB) - you may be able to throw out a (biodegradable??) plastic and aluminium-foil CD with reasonable impunity, but legally speaking AOL themselves have to take back the sticks for disposal. EXPENSIVE! And a logistical and legal nightmare.
(The cost factor is probably why they didn't send out CDRWs instead of CDs...)
2. Security and brand image. There's not a lot you can fit on a floppy in terms of gore-porn or whatever, but a flash drive is ripe for it. Viruses etc as well are a much bigger problem now. You let something rewritable out there into the public domain, particularly on an in-store display, with your company name printed all over it and an encouragement for people to stick it in their PC? You're just asking for trouble. I could probably fill something like that full of trojans and horse wang using my symbian phone and an adaptor plug, FFS. OK, they could use ROMs, but those things are hellish expensive to manufacture and high-capacity ones are only used where there is a good reason something else can't be.
(again, another reason they didn't use CDRWs ... floppies had to do because they were the only practical medium available at the time - but even so, I'm pretty sure most discs I received from AOL, or any other company putting a label with their name on, were supplied Read-Only with the write-protect tab entirely missing. Simple matter to put a bit of masking tape around it, but at least they tried)
3. Internet content delivery. Where do you get most of your software from these days? Over the wire. Physical media is dying out for those purposes for all except dedicated games consoles, and even they have a large amount of internet downloaded software. Most computers come with built-in TCP/IP stacks, networking drivers, and web browsers. All you need to give your potential (modem-based) users is a phone number to call - or even to dial into - where they'll speak to someone or interact with a webpage that'll take their payment details and tell them the four or five edit boxes they need to type stuff into to get it all working. More commonly, these days getting online requires either a physical broadband hookup to be installed, or an ADSL filter on your end and some config changes made at the phone company/ISP... it's not just as simple as hooking up your modem and inserting a disc. There's a process that has to be gone through. Better to just give out a cheap pamphlet that lays out what needs done, and who to call.
I too never threw them out; they made great coasters, and you could make dandy bases for dioramas/models with 'em too. Oh, yeah, and mini-frisbees...UltimatheChosen said:
However, I never did use them in a computer.
-- Steve