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I'm not even sure it's right to call this corpse fucking, because the corpse in question has already been fucked repeatedly. It's more like a particularly nasty case of sloppy seconds, taking place after rigor mortis has already kicked in.
The meat just falls right off the bones...
Quick, trademark the term "Brand Necrophilia" before someone else does.
Too late, I bet SCO already has it...
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/39961152/2419) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sungo
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 5:57 AM (UTC)
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those of us who work for aol are wondering the exact same thing. we're still hoping they use gecko. since we have gecko in several european clients already. i haven't heard anything official on what browser it will be tho.
I just wish Mozilla would fix their text edit widget. The novelty of having it do weird and random things when confronted with cursor keys has worn off.
Let's not forget the Mac client... it's gecko-rific!
necrophilia.. because there's nothing like popping a stiff cold one on a hot, hot day.
Hey, at least they're dropping the "AOL" name from good ol' "AOL Time Warner" this week. You must be at least a little pleased about that, right? Right?
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/5887295/515656) | From: jwz
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 11:46 AM (UTC)
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Uh, no, I couldn't care less what they call themselves.
Well, I thought maybe it'd be a tiny bit of satisfaction that TW sees their name sullied by the same AOL, so much so that they're changing it. Or not. Whatever. ::mutters, walks away::
Jeez, don't you remember when Netscape introduced the Netscape-branded discount ISP in the UK? If I remember correctly, we did that in early 1999 - although I can't remember if that was originally a Mike Homer thing, or if was just one of the first of many instances of AOL corpse-fucking...
Netscape-the-UK-ISP shut down in early 2002. I wonder how long the US version is going to last.
| From: jwz
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 11:56 AM (UTC)
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No, I'd totally forgotten about that -- or maybe I never noticed in the first place. I do remember when they started the "netscape.net" web-mail thingy. Originally Homer was actually going to pimp out "netscape.com" email addresses, but I think dmose/dmay/lord staged a hunger strike or something to put a stop to that. "Having fought to keep ads from appearing in every corner of Communicator, I've come to believe that if Mike Homer could get his kids into Harvard for free by tattooing ``Harvard'' on their foreheads, he would do it in a flash." -- Hagan Rivers, Netscape UI designer, 1997.
thankfully I'd quit by then so I no longer was anywhere near or effected by mike homer. I do have fond memories of him getting stuck in the tent of doom and flaying about trapped in the netting. Brings a smile to my face to this day.
didn't homer end up renaming his children "nike" and "coca-cola" with accompanying logo tattoos on the forhead?
I think I still have one of the free CD's they gave out
Milking anything possible from the corpse, irony be damned.
Kind of the opposite of a leveraged buyout. Absorb a bunch of companies and dream up ways to reduce the value of all component parts. Nihilistic brilliance, really.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/9741037/631654) | From: emacsmood
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 9:55 AM (UTC)
Envisioning a cheapass version of AOL... | (Link)
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makes my head spin. What, it has hyooooge icons and ads with about a 50x50 pixel area for actual browsing? Users are allowed to send 3 email messages a week and their inbox is limited to 5K? IM only lets them use words of less than three syllables starting with "z" and randomly drops messages? They can only connect with a rare 127.5 baud handset-coupled modem made by Racal-Vadic in the mid 70s? Instead of "you've got mail!" it says "umail."? Only runs on a 286?
All this, and MORE!
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/8558187/1317206) | From: dzm6
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 12:58 PM (UTC)
*sniff* | (Link)
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I miss working for Netscape. We were totally doomed, but it felt like we were fighting the good fight.
AOL fucked our happy doomed little company. If AOL had not acquired us, we'd just be a footnote now. This would be a Good Thing though, since at least AOL wouldn't be sticking a stick up Netscape's ass every year or two and making the corpse dance.
AOL makes me want to cry.
"It's a real shame what happened to our company."
-- JB
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/13979719/48801) | From: king_mob
Thu, 16-Oct-2003 2:57 PM (UTC)
Re: *sniff* | (Link)
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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/6280857/665803) | From: phygelus
Fri, 17-Oct-2003 3:08 PM (UTC)
Re: *sniff* | (Link)
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This would be a Good Thing though, since at least AOL wouldn't be sticking a stick up Netscape's ass every year or two and making the corpse dance.
It's a shame that this mostly only happens to companies.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/31022288/132613) | From: aml
Wed, 15-Oct-2003 2:18 PM (UTC)
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i thought compuserve was already the cheap version of AOL. it already has the single email address, the google-powered search, etc.
perhaps it's a rebranding, or they're going to give the fucker two names. i was just kind of surprised the geniuses at Cnet totally ignored the existance of a service very like the one they describe. i didn't think they were this incompetent.
c|net used be part of my daily browse until I got irritated with the rampant stupidity of the bulk of it and stopped reading. I've recently started picking up the RSS feed because it allows me to skim it and go, "Stupid, stupid, stupid, hmm. interesting. Stupid, stupid, stupid..." Every once in a while something useful shows up that hasn't already been linked to death by The Register, BoingBoing, or some other one of the things I read.
The strategy most likely is to save AOL's failing ISP business by using the General Motors strategy--have a bunch of brands which are all essentially the same thing, but make it look to the consumer that they are all separate products. If consumers are picking between 20 choices and 10 of them are AOL-brands, then the random consumer choice will frequently end up on an AOL brand. It's stupid and annoying.
CompuServe is a 7 screen name/address client with the gecko engine.
CompuServe Basic is the $9.9n cut-price version with a single email address which is being pitched to those departing AOL for low-price dialup alternatives. Was pitched from Netscape as well, for a while. At least some CompuServe members discovered it and signed up, so using the Netscape brand name may be intended to let Netscape be bargain basement, CompuServe be middle of the road "value" brand and AOL be high end, cutting the chance of taking CompuServe members away.
Trying to get as much money as possible from the customers, by pitching them the highest-priced option they will take.
i thought maybe that corpse-fucking link would have linked to today's penny-arcade..
netscape powered by microsoft internet explorer is the ultimate irony.
| From: dzm6
Thu, 16-Oct-2003 10:12 AM (UTC)
"Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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Really?
# telnet www.netscape.com 80
Trying 64.12.151.215...
Connected to www.netscape.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
set-cookie: dcisid=2164196861.1066249493.848562; path=/
Set-Cookie: sampler=1066323974;DOMAIN=.aol.com:2080;PATH=/;EXPIRES=Wed, 06 Oct 2004 17:06:14 GMT
P3P: CP="NOI OUR PSA DEV PSD STA COM CUR"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 17:06:14 GMT
Server: AOLserver/3.5.5
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 49740
Connection: close
Netscape.com stopped using Enterprise Server about a year ago. AOL.com too. In fact, the wanker in charge of AOL's web properties is forcing everyone to move to AOLServer. Yay HTTP/1.0! Yay TCL!
AOL wanted only two things from Netscape:
- The name and logo (Read "Brand")
- The web site (Read "Why?")
Everything else was superfluous and could be used as bargaining tools when dealing with Microsoft.
From: shaver
Thu, 16-Oct-2003 12:43 PM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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Before the acquisition, AOL was talking to the exuberant Gecko team about using Gecko in their upcoming clients. It might have just been foreplay, but it's also possible that AOL was actually interested in the "NGLayout" technology. (Of course, everyone was more interested in it before they _got_ it, but that's a totally different story of pigs and pokes.)
| From: dzm6
Thu, 16-Oct-2003 11:08 PM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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AOL promised everyone all kinds of cool shit:
We won't change your culture
You will still get free soda
- We will give you T-Shirts that can be easily modified to say "AOL/Netscape FUCK THE NET"
- We will have a
Great Partnership With Sun and Everything Will Be Neat-o
- We will grant (nearly) everyone more options at the Low Low Strike of $74
We will not stop ordering espresso beans for the espresso machines
- We
won't make the environment so terrible to work in that most of you will quit long before we even consider giving you severence packages
- When we do get around to paying people to stop bothering us, we will never pay you to stop bothering us. Suffer! SUFFER!
Of course we're 100% committed to Mozilla. It has a key role to play in the future of AOL.
- The list goes on...
Striken indicates that they failed on this promise.
God, I should have quit much earlier than I did.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/7009457/880638) | From: cyeh
Fri, 17-Oct-2003 5:34 PM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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Well yes, that was when Gecko could actually fit on an 1.4 MB floppy, rendering engine and all.
What people failed to realize then was there was a big difference between "a small engine that is clearly designed to do demos on squeaky clean HTML" and the messy godforksaken disaster that exists in the wild.
Without naming names, someone expressed shock at the number of pages that existed without proper end tags.
From: darkonc
Thu, 1-Jan-2004 11:23 AM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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What they really wanted (and got) was the right to sue MS for screwing Netscape with their monopoly powers... Part of the result was that MS paid Netscape/Time-Warner to use IE. As far as I remember, AOL got more money out of the lawsuit than they paid for the company... After that, everything else was candy.
| From: dzm6
Thu, 1-Jan-2004 11:47 PM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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As far as I remember, AOL got more money out of the lawsuit than they paid for the company... After that, everything else was candy.
You're joking, right? No, really?
When the deal was announced the acquisition was worth a little over $4.5 Billion. By the time it closed the value of the stock of both companies had gone up pushing the acquisition price to around $9 Billion.
Last time I checked $750M < $9B. This ignores any revenue AOL may have recognized from things like iPlanet as well as the money poured into four years of Mozilla development.
It'll be a long time before Microsoft lawsuits reimburse AOL for the cost of acquiring Netscape.
From: darkonc
Fri, 2-Jan-2004 8:29 AM (UTC)
Re: "Wanted their server technology"? | (Link)
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Hmm. I guess that the report that I saw was in post-dot.bust share values.
| From: cyeh
Thu, 16-Oct-2003 9:50 AM (UTC)
you're right... | (Link)
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My head just exploded.
| From: jwz
Fri, 17-Oct-2003 3:15 PM (UTC)
dawn notes a blast from the past | (Link)
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| From: dzm6
Fri, 17-Oct-2003 5:06 PM (UTC)
Re: dawn notes a blast from the past | (Link)
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Ewww. That so ain't right.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/2498716/689304) | From: jonabbey
Sat, 18-Oct-2003 8:52 AM (UTC)
Re: dawn notes a blast from the past | (Link)
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What, on the theory that are tons of people who are simultaneously a) so newbie to the net that they need a portal page, and b) going to know that there ever was such a place as Mosaic Communications Corp.?
I think not, captain.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/26104787/6145587) | From: lohphat
Mon, 28-Feb-2005 7:56 PM (UTC)
Re: dawn notes a blast from the past | (Link)
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I remember when jimb told dmose and I to kill mcom.com, but no one would tolerate the intrusion into their system configs nor system restarts. Thus mcom.com lives in every major routing device in the bowels of the place.
I quit 2 months before the AOL merger accouncement in 1998 -- I never received an AOL paycheck. Except... Over two years after I had left I received an overwithholding refund for some past year some bean counter found hiding under a brass pole in the boardroom.
Bastards. My soul is now unclean.
From: (Anonymous)
Fri, 17-Oct-2003 9:26 PM (UTC)
No match ?! | (Link)
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Yeah, sucks when google lets you down. I had my own search miss, on this very-paranoid-friday for me: Your search - "escaping a garrotte (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22escaping+a+garrotte%22)" - did not match any documents. | |
