[Nettime-bold] AOL's Latest Internal Woe

[David Mandl <dmandl@panix.com>]

March 22, 2002
AOL's Latest Internal Woe: 'You've
Got Mail' -- 'Oops, No You Don't'

By MATTHEW ROSE and MARTIN PEERS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

NEW YORK -- America Online is the world's most successful Internet
service provider -- except, apparently, in its own house.

In a humbling reversal, AOL Time Warner Inc. is retreating from a
top-level directive that required the divisions of the old Time Warner
to convert to an e-mail system based on AOL software and run by
America Online's giant public server computers in Virginia.

The drive to get all the company's 82,000 employees to use AOL e-mail
was an attempt to give symbolic resonance to the marriage of AOL and
Time Warner, the largest corporate merger in U.S. history and perhaps
the most-scrutinized litmus test for the marriage of the old and new
economies.

Instead, management got months of complaints from both senior and
junior executives in the divisions involved, who said the e-mail
system, initially designed for consumers, wasn't appropriate for
business use [what a lame excuse--D.M.]. Among the problems cited: The
e-mail software frequently crashed, staffers weren't able to send
messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline
without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of
users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the
system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL etherworld
and never found. And if there was an out-of-office reply function,
most people couldn't find it.

[snip]

Time Inc., the U.S.'s largest magazine publisher and a heavy e-mail
user, was the company's worst-hit division. Late last year, ad sales
executives in Entertainment Weekly's Chicago office were trying to
e-mail a presentation to a major advertising agency. Because the
system has trouble handling large attachments, the e-mail didn't
arrive. At the last minute the office had to send a staff member in a
cab with a printed version.

Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.'s editor in chief, recalls that e-mails
containing final page proofs of some magazines never made it to his
computer because they were routed to an old e-mail address. He also
inadvertently offended then-People magazine Managing Editor Carol
Wallace by failing to reply to her e-mails. He just hadn't received
them.

"The system didn't work well for heavy data and graphics users," says
Edward Adler, an AOL Time Warner senior vice president and corporate
spokesman.

But there was more. Staffers groused they had to log onto their office
computers using a portable electronic number tag that sometimes broke;
and they grumbled they were no longer able to use portable e-mail
devices, such as BlackBerries, because they weren't compatible with
AOL. In late January, executives at Warner Music tried to alert
employees to problems with the new system. "2% of e-mail is being
lost," the internal e-mail read. "If you are expecting critical
e-mail, you may want to follow up with the sender."

Apparently weary of the complaints, at a regular meeting of top
executives Wednesday, the company decided to allow divisions to use
any e-mail system they want, including those from International
Business Machines Corp. and archrival Microsoft Corp. If the divisions
choose outside products, their e-mail systems likely won't be housed
on America Online's servers in Dulles, Va. Some members of the
company's tech staff have dubbed the reclamation plan "Project
Phoenix."

Divisions will now be able to pick "the system that better suits their
individual business needs," says Mr. Adler.

[snip]

The e-mail problems have led many staffers to resume pre-Internet
habits. Employees say they are faxing and using Federal Express more
than before. They also are picking up the phone or wandering down the
corridors in search of human contact. "If all goes well, we'll never
have to use e-mail and we'll have to start talking to each other
again," says one magazine writer.

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com
davem@wfmu.org
http://www.wfmu.org/~davem

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