Welcome to the AOL Employee Community Blog!
First, I am a long time AOL employee. I've seen good times and bad... enough to fill a book. And like many of you, although I have my share of bad days, I still care about this company and about the talented people who make the business work day after day.
Reading the posts and comments on Alley Insider and ValleyWag has shown me varied things about my fellow employees. We are collectively thoughtful, funny, angry, passionate, dedicated, logical, smart, emotional and sometimes just totally pissed off.
The disconnect between top management and the folks in the trenches just seems to be getting larger.
We need somewhere to express our thoughts and allow ideas to shape without constraint.
I humbly offer this blog as a forum for problem discussion, venting and thoughtful reflection by a community that I know well and respect, AOL employees.
Here's the first issue I'll offer to the group for comment: the current top management seem to be Manager 1.0 types with: command and control, dictated policies, secrecy, emphasis on "teamwork" but allowing competitive internal processes that undermine it, and imposing deadlines on those who do the work by those who do not.
This will hardly fly in a typical 21st century company, much less one that is filled with intelligent, skilled, digital savvy employees. My question: IS THERE HOPE?
Can we marshal our collective resources and get through to the powers that be? Can they get over the "top down only" mentality and realize that there is a vast group intelligence waiting to be tapped? Can R&R change to truly realize that they have an incredible resource (the AOL employee community) that can be mobilized to innovate, develop and execute the vision of a vibrant company?
17 comments:
There is hope but we have to get control away from finance types who sacrifice long term profits for that easy $1 Billion coming in every year in the short term.
First we need to recognize why millions of customers chose AOL over AT&T, Prodigy, and others. We gave them something to do online. Their destination was our community, and in spite of ourselves there are still people living in this community. We should invest in it.
Second we need to more carefully choose where we offer our services and then we need to commit to winning when we decide to enter a market. We deliver some excellent, innovative 1.0 products and when they aren't as big as AIM within months we abandon them. How can we expect web users to trust and become invested in using AOL products when we are so quick to abandon them when they aren't as big as Yahoo in a year.
Third we need to deliver products when the feature set and experience are right for our members. We have seen what happens when finance drives product schedules. Underbaked products get rushed out the door at the end of the fiscal year for optimal tax benefits. Then when they aren't as successful as they could've been had they not been rushed out in Q4, they are left to die on the vine.
We should also be more careful about moving product ownership. When products are reassigned to different teams as often as they are, it doesn't create a strong incentive to become invested in your work, understand the competition, and implement innovation.
I am very interested in seeing what happens next week. If I'm cut, I leave with smiles. If not, why would I want to stay? Why would anyone, regardless of rank and position, want to keep working in a company like this? This is not what big companies do. There are way better companies out there. When was the last time AOL hired good people? Or got good press reviews?
IMO: If you don't get cut and you don't leave in 08 then AOL better be paying you considerably well to stay.
There is no future at this company. It has slid far worse than Apple ever did. Steve Case is not coming back. This company will never win back the users it had or ever get new ones of any value.
The writing is on the wall. The company does not care about being central to people's lives and more.
AOL will soon be just another ad agency.
I can't wait to leave this company in my dust. (I will collect my bonus but even if its a big one and even if I get promoted thanks to the large numbers of talent that leaves this company every day. I am out.)
Matrixed,
First, thank you for putting up this site. I’ve bookmarked it and intend to frequent it daily!
By way of disclosure, I am an AOL ex-pat, having left the company a few months back for what I thought to be greener pastures. I was with the company for six years, and saw a lot of products and strategies come and go, and have shared the frustration with what you aptly describe as the widening gap between management and people in the trenches. Having been on the other side of the fence has served to reinforce that sentiment, but also to instill a resolution that there is hope; things can get better.
Why should I care, you might ask, given that I no longer work for the company and the dreaded layoffs are about to commence. I care because I know there is indeed a very talented group of dynamic and engaging people at AOL; folks with whom I hope to work with again one day. I’d welcome the opportunity to come back and be part of a movement to set things straight.
I think your question on “getting through to the powers that be” is poignant, and one that suggests a few remedies for setting things straight and shrinking the executive/people gap:
1) Create and Promote a Mechanism for Feedback – I’m not talking about the nonsensical GoAlign system (or even OnTrack or OnTarget!), rather a discipline for true quantitative measurement and analysis, with a consistent focus on the bottom line: profit. Think about how programs and products have been and currently are developed, launched, and tracked… what metrics are associated with success? How and when is it measured, and by whom? I repeatedly saw programs flounder and many hours of wasted effort by valuable people resources because no one had given adequate thought to discernable measures of success. The culture of “we’ve always done things this way” has generated tons (literally!) of decks that describe a few bullets of fluffery, always ending with the “next steps” slide, which typically reads something akin to “rinse, wash, repeat”.
2) Question Everything – I was excited to learn one day that new SVP to my group asked us to do something I had practiced since day one: asking “so what?” when counseling the business on strategy, campaign design and execution, and performance measures. I never meant to this to be a cynical question, rather one designed to foster creative thinking and dialogues that would encourage participation from everyone around the table. Take a look at the corporate objectives from years past; how dramatic the differences, and how vapid the goal! If these don’t make sense, then how can work on a daily basis make sense? When tasked with something to “just get it done”, to “just get it out in time”, or “just hurry up” is usually a clear sign that management has no clue what “it” is designed to accomplish.
3) Become Transparent – Without a doubt, AOL is a place filled with talented, intelligent people, but it is also a place full of fiefdoms managed by folks that are unwilling to cooperate and share information with each other. An unfortunate result here is that no one is held accountable. If everyone has a common understanding of the health of the business (#1 above), and also has an opportunity to sit at the discussion table (#2), then the culture of protectionism will vanish. Again, look at the (tons!) of decks floating around, and examine any one for descriptions on goals/objectives, strategy or methodology to accomplish those goals, and results. More than likely, you’ll find grand language on goals and objectives, zero on strategy and methodology, and only a smattering for result (anticipated or actual). Sharing strategy and methodology will not only help others understand how you accomplished your objective, but also serve to weed out the more inept managers who either have no idea what they are talking about or are simply regurgitating a deck that someone else put together for them
Again, I do believe there is hope for AOL. Especially if folks continue to rally around each other and in your words mobilize to “innovate, develop and execute the vision of a vibrant company”.
I was there for over ten years, and was laid off last Dec, which was a good thing. I did my tour of various positions of some responsibility and had a lot of fun, but the last two years I was there it was totally depressing and I’ve came to the conclusion that the legacy product led access/consumer utility offerings path we grew up with simply isn’t going to work, not with the business priority of TWX and the consumer taste these days and the pace of innovation in this industry. Now it looks like RandR concluded the portal strategy doesn’t have leg either, which makes sense since we know the majority of the traffic came from the access customers and shrink with that as well. The advertising.com path looks promising now, so here we go. They/We’ve tried many things, some worked, some worked for a moment, many did not. It’s all an experiment; just because we did a few things right in the late 90’s give us no birthright for future success. And really, the 1B/yr cash flow isn’t shabby either, as a share holder(yeah I am still a sucker) I’d rather see the dividend and buy backs than them burning the cash on more of the failed product experiments.
I hope the package will be good this time, which make it easy to move forward, I mean there is hope in moving on and moving forward, not in trying to revive the old glory. As for me I have my new gig and am much happier now. Evolution is a universal algorithm, big animals like the T Rex or big company like AOL can’t adjust easily (trying hard as it does), but individuals has no excuse not to evolve with the changing ecosystem and prosper on their own path. When it’s time to move on you just have to move on.
There isn't any hope until an effective CEO is back at the head of AOL. I agree with a post on allyinsider that laid out what such a person needs: a) vision b) charisma and c) people skills.
Behavior of past weeks shows how lacking current execs are in (c).
But charisma and people skills are secondary compared to the need for vision. It's the lack of vision that has been killing AOL for the past 5 years.
No exec has been able to find, embrace, and champion a new identity vision for AOL within TWX or more importantly to itself.
Nothing exemplifys the lack-of-purpose more than the new corporate mission statement that was adopted a year ago.
The orginal AOL mission/vision statement was centered on getting people online, and AOL succeeded at that so well that it bought TW.
But now noone at the top knows what AOL should be or do. It continues to drift forward as a collection of free portals and commodity or niche/play products while the access business & revenue continues to dwindle.
It was clear 6-7 years ago that AOL needed a new core product/identity to base it's future revenue on. Google won the search-engine battle at its appearance. AIM, MapQuest, news, blogs, social networks, are all free commodity products to consumers and have tens or hundreds of sites/companies competing for eyeballs. While AOL should be able to keep those viable they won't be major sources of revenue in their current models.
Yes, AOL has one of the top three advertising placement platforms today but revenue there from a middleman activity won't ever support AOL at 1/100th of it's heyday size.
Is AOL going to be a content producer by launching more TMZ's? It would take 100's of new successfull e-zines to support AOL as a new media division. But such content creation is not AOL's area expertise... (though it *is* TW's).
During the last 6 years AOL had the needed expertise in just about all areas of online technology, financials, newsfeeds, emails/IM, multi-player games, music/movie delivery, cross-platform device experiance on PC, Macs, set-top boxes, phones, home-routers, and more. At any point through that time AOL could have executed well on damn near ANY future technolgy product vision that it's technology organizations were pointed at -- IF the company set it as a strategic direction.
But for years AOL left control of the budget pocketbook with the old/existing lines of business -- with %'s largly along the lines of the revenue still being generated. So entrenched product empires dithered away huge sums of money on experimental, fringe, or external partnerships on existing products that either were clearly going to wither (Access) or become commodity priced or free (blogs/journals, email, web-storage, ...)
And no major budget was focused on finding/launching NEW post-access-model revenue bases.
I take that back.. One exception to that was AOL Total-Talk - aol's foray into VOIP telephony.
AOL spent millions building their own VOIP system. But did it separately and a year behind TWCable efforts at building/launching Digital Phone.
TWX never needed TWO VOIP platforms.
When launched AOL's had full E911 coverage adn was better in features than all other competing plans. It had leveraged AOL's past systems from CallAlert and AOLByPhone, etc so customers had features that no other VOIP company had yet dreamed about.
A horrible early EVP decision was to outsource the product ordering system because AOL's internal cost/time estimates were 'too high'. Yep, you guessed it, the oursourced system ended up taking longer, costing more, was buggy and unstable. But that could have been fixed.
But then AOL was informed that they couldn't market/sell TotalTalk in TWCable markets. TWC was more concerned with Digital Phone making it's numbers and DigitalPhone had higher per-customer profits (as it was priced to compete with landline long distance, while AOL's was priced to compete with Vonage) That blocked a huge percentage of voip-capable areas. So between order-system problems and being hamstrung by restricted market area AOL never acquired any significant customer base. So a year later the best VOIP feature set on the market was turned off.
Kingdom building by the AOL VP in charge was why AOL built a completely independant system rather than adding its great set of online features and dashboard on-top of the TWCable VOIP system.
AOL tech architects raised these questions/concerns at the beginning of TotalTalk planning... ("Why are we building a separate CLEC, E911, call-metering system when TWC already has one built?") But the AOL SVP in charge of TotalTalk had visions of being the head of his own phone company ... and look where it got us/him. That's the kind of leadership AOL has had for the past 6 years.
So the one major new product area with real revenue potential that AOL exec's had in the past 6 years they botched horribly because of poor exec. decisions and because they couldn't partner with other TWX divisions.
And no exec since has had the b_lls to propose/champion anything else. Even though several real possibilities have been submitted to internal suggestion boxes.
As Lee Iacocca's book title asks: "Where have all the leaders gone?"
Dashed Hopes - you've said all that needs to be said. I've been here about 10 years out of the last 13 and agree that there's never been a lack of smart people, just a lack of discipline, leadership and a desire to define success in products and customers rather than in fiefdoms. I've long said that we haven't hurt enough to really change our ways, perhaps the upcoming tide will provide that impetus, if it's not too late.
You're clearly one of my former voip compatriots? See you at Dominion on Tuesday, I'll have my name tag on.
dashed hopes: you are full of nonsense. Your hope rides on some superhero CEO who has the big dick to tell Dick P no? In the vision department how could you forget Jon Miller's Web 2.0 stuffs. VOIP? you think we'll ever be a player in that brutal world? Oh yeah a bunch of us AOL guys tried in that space, and proved our magic touch with that shop called Sunrocket. Get over it, we served the need of the consumer and the market for a while, now they've passed us. secrete sauce? yeah right.
What, you're saying Dick Parsons and wouldn't *let* AOL invest in a new future? That's possible now if TW really has decided to just milk all the AOL access revenue it can and then turn off the lights. But I don't believe that has been true for the past 5 years.
But just saying Web 2.0 and playing with mashups and plug-in toys wasn't ever an answer. What Web 2.0 stuff has gone beyond cool toys and has demonstrated positive revenue potential in the marketplace? The Web 2.0 sites that always get cited are free mashups that depend on ad hosting revenue. And most of the API's and widgets that are used in mashup examples are all themselves free. I don't know of any consumers that PAY facebook, youtube, etc.
I'd much rather be part of a company that has PRODUCTS that customers are willing to SPEND $$$ FOR and thus generate real revenue.
Find/target products that are *worth* it for customers to spend money for. THEN worry about building them in Web 2.0 compliant ways so that the mashup artists of the world can help you add additional value.
Only a fraction of revenue from 'real products' gets spent on advertizing. The past large AOL organization can't survive on ad revenues on commodity news portals anymore than Yahoo ever could. Yahoo was smart enough to buy some other real companies with stock while its stock was riding high. So now Yahoo's future isn't just dependant on portal ad revenues for its life.
When its stock was high AOL bought something else -- TimeWarner. That did give AOL(-TW) another ongoing revenue base. So I guess in one sense you can say AOL (ignoring the name changes) *will* survive if this spiral continues to the point of someone turning off the lights in Dulles.
@bobzmudaguy: Haha... you are a funny guy... although obviously very bitter too. But your comments are welcome here.
Working at AOL is not easy, period. An honest evaluation will uncover a lot of crap. But there are still many good people and initiatives.
But for any employee that feels the negatives have overwhelmed the remaining positives -- it is time to leave, grasshopper.
I've seen former employees who just couldn't take anymore and needed to leave just to get "the poison" out of their systems. Post-AOL they are much happier.
Something to consider.
you know, i worked for AOL for about 9 years. left in 2004. i'm stunned that there are still 'believers'. especially 'believers' who purportedly support the "brilliant talent" working at AOL.
i knew some brilliant people at AOL, and i knew some idiots at AOL, but i don't think a squadron of 5,000 stephen hawking-caliber minds could fix AOL.
the company is a behemoth that refused to take chances, eschewed agility, opted for the easy buck and desperately tried to repackage catch-up technologies in an effort to trick everyone into thinking they were innovative.
AOL just has nowhere to go. without completely resurrecting itself in another (possibly lateral) industry with nothing resembling the present AOL other than name and infrastructure, there's nothing. the ad revenue is great, but it's textbook atrophy... as people slowly migrate from the admittedly well-ensconsed AIM world to other IM platforms and realise how much better email service can really be, the eyeballs AOL is assaulting with heartless greedy ads will dwindle. it'll be a slow, painful, and fading death.
know what i'd do? i'd leverage that massive infrastructure to become the kingpin in a new music industrly. clearly the present music industry is dying, and digital downloads of SOME variety are sure to be key to its rebirth. AOL already has ties to some of the major players, or at least did with its Warner and Bertelsmann connections.
but hey what do i know, i quit, gave up the soul-crushing IT industry and i'm sitting outside the studio in malibu where i work now looking out over catalina and contemplating what to do with my weekend.
best of luck to you all, though, quite honestly. it's none of the employees' fault they work for people who could give a fuck.
c said:
"...i'd leverage that massive infrastructure to become the kingpin in a new music industrly. clearly the present music industry is dying, and digital downloads of SOME variety are sure to be key to its rebirth. AOL already has ties to some of the major players,..."
You're not the only one.
A tech at AOL has been pitching a strong proposal along these lines for quite some time and hasn't been able to find an interested AOL exec.
Draw your own conclusions.
Dashed hopes said:
"A tech at AOL has been pitching a strong proposal along these lines for quite some time and hasn't been able to find an interested AOL exec."
This is exactly what AOL should be doing -- encouraging and seriously evaluating the ideas posed by employees who understand the industry and our capabilities.
I'd love to see the music proposal and any other new ideas employees have put thought and effort into. My email is on the contact page.
Laid off from AOL? Call Aquent in the DC-metro area ...
My name is Missy, and I'm an account manager/recruiter with Aquent. Aquent is the only global staffing company dedicated to marketing and creative services organizations.
AOL employees who were laid off who have creative or marketing backgrounds should call Aquent immediately. We can help these folks quickly identify new job opportunities.
Call Aquent at 703-390-0290 immediately and/or forward your resume to msutton@aquent.com ...
As a resident of Loudoun County (Ashburn) and an employee with a defense contractor, I thank you for this site and the comments posted by all current and former AOLers. I am getting the bug to change jobs and with that, work closer to home. I've contemplated both AOL and Verizon as they are right down the street.
Having read the comments, I think I'll shy away from AOL (especially after the confirmed latest round of layoffs). Verizon isn't much better. Thanks.
I worked for AOL from '98 to 2001, till just before the TW merger. Just to pick up on what "C" said, I've wondered why AOL didn't keep the subscription, but start offering music and video downloads. Wouldn't that be the kind of marriage of TW and AOL content Case & co. envisioned?
The AOL Dulles campus, once the flagship, is now abandoned and slated for demolition. End of an era.
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