Verizon Brand Sabotage

[jducoeur]

Today in "boneheaded corporate moves", we have Verizon.

My mother has triple-play (Internet/phone/TV) service from Verizon; as such, her primary email address is currently through verizon.net, as you'd expect. She also has a Gmail address, that I nudged her into.

She got a letter yesterday, announcing that Verizon is terminating its email service. She has three weeks to decide whether to transition entirely to a third-party service, or switch to AOL.

AOL.

Even Mom, who is, shall we say, not the most tech-savvy member of the family, had the reaction of, "Isn't AOL -- bad?". I've told her to just switch everything to her Gmail account: while Google may not be my favorite company in the world, this is yet more proof that getting your email through your ISP is just a bad plan.

But still -- AOL? Really? I mean, yes, they want to justify their ownership of the stupid company, but that's one of the most poisoned brands in the history of tech. Pushing all of their ISP customers over to it seems like a recipe to lose a lot of customers, with no obvious benefit.

Anybody have any insights into this apparently-foolish move?

Comments

[keshwyn]

I've been after my dad and stepdad to get off AOL for *years*. They expressly don't allow 2FA. I have no idea what in the world Verizon is thinking, but they'd better be putting some serious work into AOL if they think they're going to get anything good out of this move...

[writerkit]

No thoughts on the "why", but I appreciate your illuminating the computer hell that's going to befall the library in the next three weeks-- we have a fair number of people who don't know how to use email that get their email from Verizon, and some of them may not even be able to *understand* that their email service is being terminated, let alone helping us help them set something new up.

[hudebnik]

It does sound like an effort to boost AOL's numbers and thereby make it a going concern again.

Wikipedia has the following graph of AOL subscriber numbers.

The graph cuts off in 2009, but you can add a data point of 2 million subscribers in mid-2015, when Verizon bought them.

[cellio]

Wow. The mind boggles.

Tying your email address to an ISP is bad; I wish more people realized that. Since she's going to have to get people to update their address books anyway, and since you own a domain anyway, have you considered giving her a forwarding address? That way she can tell people he address is mom@your-domain (well, not literally), and if she ever decides she wants to use something other than gmail, you can move the pointer for her. Meanwhile, she can do everything via gmail.

[jducoeur]

since you own a domain anyway, have you considered giving her a forwarding address?

Hmm. Not sure I can easily do so -- the domain is a big forwarding bucket, and I'm not certain I can pick out one address to forward separately. But it's worth investigating; thanks...