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user-inactivated · 4016 days ago · link · · parent · post: Chat Wars: Inside the late ’90s chat wars between Microsoft and AOL, from the perspective of a former Microsoft programmer
Fuck with their users over nickels. Not over nickles. AOL as an ISP was already in decline then. AIM had plenty of users whose eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. This was before they bought Time Warner (in 2000), but around the time they were buying Netscape and turning it into a portal site. They were already moving from an ISP with padded edges to selling eyeballs to advertisers.AOL was so fucking rich they bought Time Warner the next year. And what did they do?