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April 15, 2004
AOL goes HTML
AOL is moving away from their proprietary markup language.
AOL's online service has always been a walled garden. At one point even, AOL users could only send email to other AOL users and were unable to view any content on the Interent -- just content that lived inside AOL's proprietary network. Since the late 90's there's been a hole in the wall that lets AOL users get out to the Web (and lets email come in), but all the content in the AOL garden was still authored in their own proprietary markup language.
That's changing. AOL has started buiding their content in and migrating their services to HTML (though it will be interesting to see how standards-compliant they are).
Why now? Here's the real kicker from the Post article:
"subscribers will soon be able to sign onto AOL.com from any computer without installing AOL's special software and get most of the company's content."That's a big deal (and not only because it means no more CDs in the mail), but because it means their business model is shifting to be more directly competitive with Yahoo and MSN (advertising-funded services with premium content subscriptions). I'm sure there'll still be a client-side app, if for no other reason than it's a great ease-of-use benefit to newbies. But there are fewer and fewer online newbies in America these days, so that market advantage is shrinking.
A walled garden works great as a business model as long as what's inside the garden is more attractive than what's outside. For years, though, pretty much anything you could get inside AOL was available for free or cheaper on the Internet. When the flowers in the walled garden cease to be unique, it's time for the walls to come down.
Posted April 15, 2004 09:17 AM
Comments
Even that client app should be fairly light - both Windows and MacOS have had built in TCP/IP dialup for about a decade, and there isn't a need for a custom-made solution these days. You can make a script for either that configures the settings, and a little GUI app to make it look shiny, but that's just gravy.
Comments by anthony . Posted April 15, 2004 04:40 PM