Yahoo, AOL & Hotmail Heading for the Dustbin of History
In November 2007, I wrote about the shift in internet traffic away from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL/Netscape. For its part, Microsoft would not end its takeover bidding for Yahoo
until May 2008. By then, both companies had begun their inexorable
slide from internet ubiquity and dominance. For its part, Netscape
became obsolete and unsupported by AOL, its parent company since 1999.
Now spun off, AOL continues to flounder.
Beginning
in 1995, Microsoft made history by giving away its Internet Explorer
1.0 (IE) browser. During its existence, Netscape received scant revenue
from its users. Even so, dirty tricksters sent email chain letters
warning that Netscape would soon dun every user $50. Almost
immediately, Netscape’s market share dove, while Microsoft's rose just
as quickly.
Hotmail
rode on one of the earliest internet email platforms. Still, it was
better than Netscape’s and thus Microsoft’s 1997 purchase of Hotmail
drew email users away from Netscape. Although spam emails were already a
problem in the late 1990s, no one knew that spam would someday
represent between fifty and ninety percent of all emails sent.
Microsoft/Hotmail and Yahoo’s revamped Rocketmail left both giants with
technically crude email platforms. As we learned with the MS DOS
operating system, the original architecture often determines the limits
of change within a program.
.jpg "Netscape Communicator logo GIF, owned and obsoleted by AOL (http://jamesmcgillis.com)")
During
the past fifteen years, first Netscape, then Microsoft and Yahoo took
turns dominating internet search and internet email. By building on
their market power, Microsoft at one time owned the largest share of
both search and email. Today, none of our featured companies dominates
either internet search or email. That honor went instead to a next
generation internet start-up known as Google.
Not until 2006, did Twitter’s
first Tweet chirp on the internet. In early 2007, when Twitter became a
separate company, MySpace owned over eighty percent of the social media
market. Although gaining fast, Facebook had yet to go beyond a ten
percent market share. At MySpace, each user controlled the content on
one HTML page. Whatever MySpace gained in simplicity, it lost in
flexibility. After old-media dinosaur News Corp. purchased MySpace in
2005, they stifled change. After its 2011 spin off, MySpace users still
control content on only a single webpage.
With its later launch date, Facebook drew on technology similar to Microsoft's “active server pages”,
or ASP. Each Facebook user’s home page displays a host of interactive
elements. Facebook’s network effect and ubiquity make it all that some
users have time for on the internet. Ironically, Facebook achieved what
AOL first attempted, which was to encompass and dominate the internet
experience of its many users.
What shall be the future of our internet giants, both old and new? Will
the masses still follow the tweets and rants of celebrities and fools?
Will we still “friend” each other on Facebook or “+” each other on Google+?
Texting is here to stay, but it lacks email’s ability to persuade in a
longer form. As long as people can write, they will want to ramble on
in a textural format.
Spammers
have hijacked every AOL or Yahoo email user that I know. Recently, my
Hotmail address was hacked and used by spammers. Despite several
attempts to reclaim my Hotmail address, Microsoft could not verify me.
In that process, Microsoft lost one more internet email customer. For
reasons similar to the rise of Facebook and Google, the old internet
giants will slip further. The underlying architecture of AOL mail,
Hotmail and Yahoo mail will sink further into a quicksand made of spam.
When you access your Yahoo mail or Hotmail, the
content display relies heavily on Java script. The demise of AOL and
Yahoo mail will come from their over-reliance on that Java script. If
you have any doubt, access your Yahoo email via a slow modem. There you
will see one element at a time dished to you by the email servers.
Relying on executable commands, “robot.txt” or “bots” have learned to exploit vulnerabilities within script-based email systems.
I
do not blame every internet problem on the Russians, but every day half
a dozen Russian websites crawl this blog, utilizing Java script-bots.
With compact Java code, their bots seek out security gaps, including
login locations and procedures. Once found, a high-speed computer might
be employed to crack a login/password system. If the robot hackers can
“crack” my website or your email password in five minutes or less, it
is worth the time spent. Usually, you can retrieve your identity, but
not before the indignity of spamming everyone in your online address
book.
Each time AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail loses another
email user to the spammers, they lose a customer forever. Whether
Google will still be around one hundred years from now, I cannot say.
Still, my Gmail user friends never have to offer apologies because
their email addresses were hacked. As with Facebook’s advantage over
MySpace, when Google designed Gmail for its 2004 introduction, it had
the benefit of the learning curve. Although I cannot say how Google did
it, their Gmail system seems impervious to script-based password hacks.
When comment-spammer
Good-Finance Blog invaded my website, I spent hours getting rid of
nefarious phishing comments and links. Finally, I installed an “include
file” at the very top of my website code. Through manual entry, my
“top_inc” include-file now blocks a long list of spammers’ Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses. Before gaining access to my website, comment
spammers now receive a redirect to the FBI website.
While AOL, Hotmail/Live and Yahoo email users often receive more spam
than legitimate email, Google has changed the rules for that game. At
the top of their Gmail server code, Google installed their own version
of a “top_inc” include-file. To be sure, some spam still gets through
the Gmail system, but not for long. As quickly as Gmail’s many users
report spam messages, Google denies access from the offending server.
If the spammers deploy a wider range of IP addresses, Google can refuse
email from a given country or region.
No
company is perfect, Google included. Their lapses in user privacy
policies are well known. If any company will still serve up email to
its future clients, I bet it will be Google. AOL and Yahoo will remain
niche players only for the near-term. Ultimately, hackers will end
their former status as internet search and email giants. Recently, as
Yahoo News gleefully reported, AOL announced that its once vaunted
patent library is for sale to the highest bidder. A stance like that
does not inspire confidence in the future of AOL.
By James McGillis at 09:34 PM | Technology | Comments (0) | Link
