Want to know more about this undertaking? Here are some details:
- 1 million CDs will weigh about 17 tons (roughly the same amount Rush Limbaugh lost on his diet).
- Once collected, the nomoreaolcds.com crew will drive the CDs across the country in any vehicles they can wrangle.
- Irate CD recipients cannot simply return the buggers to AOL because they're sent as bulk mail. The U.S. Postal Service will simply toss the CDs marked "return to sender."
- It would take 18 Ford F-350s or one semitrailer to haul 1 million CDs.
I think the worst part about these CDs is the havoc they can wreak. I'm not talking about the piles of spam you'll collect as an AOL member. It's the damage AOL client software, especially version 5.0 but to some degree 6.0, will do to your PC. Perhaps taking a cue from Microsoft, AOL has played fast and loose with Windows DLLs, overwriting files critical to your PC's well being and taking over your network settings, often making it difficult to connect to other service providers. That's the real reason to throw away AOL CDs.
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More from Doug
Take an unusual tour of industry happenings, and explore the interesting and the insane with Doug Barney's NetNews Weekly.
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Crashing PCs
PCs are crashing, and this time we can't blame Microsoft. For the last 15 years or so, PC sales have steadily, and sometimes even dramatically, risen. But now sales are slipping, and there's nothing Microsoft or Intel can do about it. In the early days, sales rose because people were buying their first machines. Next came the families who needed another one for Johnny and Suzie. Of course, new operating systems and applications made all that gear obsolete. Translation: more units sold. Then came the fire sales of the last year or two, when PCs became cheaper than a low-end video camera.
A few things have dampened our enthusiasm for new gear. First, many of us are spending hard-earned cash (or IT dollars if we can swing it) on handhelds. Second, based on my reading of the Sunday flyers, prices are going back up. I don't see many $299 PCs for sale anymore. But most important, there's just no compelling reason to upgrade these days. I have machines here and there around my house, and each handles the bulk of its duties with aplomb (been dying to use that word ever since I picked it up in Reader's Digest). My four-year-old Pentium laptop with 32 megs does just as well as my 300-MHz Celeron with 128 megs, my six-month-old Dell lapper or my five-year-old Pentium with an 800-meg drive.
This sad state of affairs is hurting more than just Best Buy and Circuit City. PC stalwarts like Gateway are also suffering. Gateway's rating has recently been reduced to junk-bond status, and I'm not sure if it was the latest quarter's loss of $9 million or those awful Ted Wait commercials that drove the stock down.
Microsoft Friends
Despite its many foes, Microsoft has plenty of supporters: most of its employees, the folks who bought its stock 10 years ago -- and apparently a few dead people from Utah. A group supporting Microsoft engineered the writing of some 400 letters to the Utah attorney general. Closer scrutiny revealed that two of the purported authors have been dead for some time. Microsoft laughed off the news, but privately executives expressed concern about getting the corpses to upgrade to Windows XP. Now that's going to take some serious marketing.
E-mail your thoughts to dbarney@nwc.com.
RSS
How many free AOL CDs have you received? Five, 10, 100, more? Well, nomoreaolcds.com wants to take 'em off your hands -- and in the process end the wanton distribution of these annoying disks. Its goal? Collect a cool 1 million disks and send them back from whence they came.
