Mea Culpa, I Guess

OK. OK. OK, already!

We were wro - er - maybe not exactly 100 percent right -- when we named America Online Company of the Year. But that was way back in December of 1996. That’s eons ago online.

And-and-and-another-thing: We were talking about the year 1996, which this clearly is not.

But OK, you’ve made your point. You made it painfully clear through countless gloating, often amusing and occasionally obscene E-mails. (You know who you are, Mr. Horticulturalist, and you know that what you suggest is physically impossible -- even with the help of a high-speed line.)

And most of that mail came in before AOL’s most recent troubles. I’m sure you’ve heard about the troubles -- busy signals, law suits, outages. You could hear about it even over the snickering of the rest of the industry.

And now come the quarterly results. Losses of $154.8 million. You can read all the gory details in our story, Charges Prompt AOL Earnings Outage. It’s a good story. But it’s not nearly as entertaining as the AOL press release on the same topic. Somebody in Dulles should get extra shares of AOL stock for coming up with a headline that boasts RECORD MEMBERSHIP AND SYSTEM USAGE.

Anyway, you can’t blame them for trying. They really had very little choice but to offer that flat fee deal. Competition is a funny thing. It makes you do things you may not want to do. And, as Mary Doyle, a senior analyst at IDC/Link consulting, says in our story, Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Stayin’ Online, Stayin’ Online, on the company everybody loves to hate: "This industry is so new, how could they know?"

Indeed.

Look around. It’s not just AOL that has problems. Plenty of others are retrenching, reevaluating or just plain disappearing. Some of the Internet’s more promising enterprises -- The Spot, I/Pro, Cyber-just about-anything -- are hanging by cyber-threads. And what about all those Netscape plug-in developers and online "malls," to pick on two easy targets?

The great consolidation is upon us. At least AOL’s problems stem from too much growth, too many customers. That’s a problem many would love to have.

Anyway, just to save the tiniest bit of face, here’s what we said back in December: "AOL and the other big stories of 1996 have their work cut out for them. If 1996 was a year of promises, then 1997 will be a year of down-to-earth reality. The barriers to entry are getting higher, people are starting to look for a real return on investment and the big prize -- that giant non-technical mass market out there is still waiting for the industry to prove its value. "

OK, so it’s a small consolation, but we’ll take it. Live and learn. This year, we’ll go with a sure thing for our choice for Company of the Year. How about Apple?