Return to sender: AOL nixes e-mail rule

America Online, the world's most popular Internet service, seems to be losing its home-field advantage.

Executives at AOL Time Warner, the parent company of AOL, are no longer requiring its many high-profile divisions to exclusively use an e-mail service developed by AOL's Netscape subsidiary. This flies in the face of a directive established last May that required all AOL Time Warner employees to use AOL technology as their corporate e-mail service.

Since the merger between AOL and Time Warner, executives have been trying to weave AOL's influence throughout the company's array of media and entertainment divisions. In the case of using AOL e-mail, the move was a gesture of solidarity behind the service and also offered potential cost savings by eliminating licensing fees for corporate e-mail software, such as Microsoft's Outlook or IBM's Lotus Notes.

Some AOL Time Warner divisions, including magazine publisher Time Inc. and Warner Music Group, were required to use a customized product developed by AOL's Netscape.

AOL Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose said the Netscape product was developed to meet specific needs of the company's various divisions.

"Unfortunately, it didn't work for everybody," Primrose said. "So we decided to give everybody the choice that met their needs. Some will stay with it, some will move to others."

AOL Time Warner divisions now are permitted to license e-mail management software from non-affiliated companies, such as Microsoft and IBM.

Other divisions have decided to stick with AOL and/or Netscape consumer e-mail products including AOL corporate, AOL Time Warner corporate and Time Warner Cable, according to Ann Brackbill, a spokeswoman for the AOL division.

Brackbill added that since the merger, the company has also consolidated its network backbone onto AOL's, which has made network operations across the company more efficient.

In the past, AOL Time Warner employees had been quick to complain about being forced to use AOL's e-mail system. The complaints mainly centered on the system's shortcomings for daily business tasks such as difficulty in sending large attachments and a reliance on cumbersome security features, according to an AOL Time Warner employee who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

AOL Time Warner executives have been trying to show how the marriage between the companies would chart a new course for the media empire. The company has taken steps to reduce costs by consolidating the technical management of all its Web sites, including those from Time Inc. magazines and Warner Bros. Executives have also been touting the company's ability to cross-promote its offline products, such as movies and television shows, to AOL's Internet audience.

However, most of these crossover benefits have been anecdotal. Furthermore, AOL Time Warner's latest financial earnings report showed that the AOL division, under fire for its lackluster financial growth, gained $138 million worth of advertisements from other AOL Time Warner divisions during the fourth quarter of 2001. That spending helped the AOL division report less of a revenue loss from the sour advertising environment.

News.com's John Borland contributed to this report.

[thelawdog]

I guess things have always worked out well for me. I am not nearly as angry about things as some of you seem to be. A part of me wants to tell you like the guys say on the NFL pre-game show "aw com on man suck it up a little bit". However, my time in the RWWCOG was relatively brief compared to some of the rest of you and I was out before evidently dark and scary times came.
A little about me and my history. My family became aware of the "bit A" during his radio ministries in the 40's/50's. My grandfather was a western Missouri farmer that had lived through the great depression the best way he could. His oldest son fought through some of the darkest days of the Korean War. I think Herbert somehow knew how to deal with peoples deepest fears kind of like Farrakhan does with the NOI. In the early 60's, when I was in my early grade years, we started to attend RWWCOG.
My maternal grandmother seemed to be the one in some ways more interested in the church. My grandad had a more practical sense. He had a herd of black angus that needed constant tending so that was an automatic disqualifier for the FOT. At the time my father, a recently discharged Air Force officer, became more interested in the church. About dad, enough cannot be said. I think "big A" fed upon the fears of the times "duck and cover" all that. It was the height of the Cold War and my father was a minister of death as part of the Cold War.
Around and about the time of the early 60's we started regularly attending church services. I was in the early grade school years. We lived in Columbus, OH. My father worked for the Fed Gov, like I did many years later. That was when our problems started with the church. My mother, who was a free spirit, had disagreements with the church minister, Mr. Hoops. His wife liked to gossip about other members. I guess when mom disagreed with that, he and his wife came to the house and sought to counsel her on her bad behavior/poor attitude. I think this was the time of great disillusionment for my parents. You realize that like most of you, I was subjected to the strange disorder of the church. I learned there was no Christmas, no celebrating birthdays, about all the crazy things you guys have talked about on this format, that the same letters in Santa were spelled out in the word "Satan". I was a little boy at the time, so what did I know. I can remember my dad telling me years later his father had told him, "Don't you realize that boy will hate you?" Of course, we had the FOT and that was okay for me. Because, when you were a young kid the FOT was pretty good. That was before you were trying to achieve in an ordinary school with ordinary kids. When going to the FOT, when by now being in 5th, 6th, 7th grade and because of taking time out from school to be able to attend the FOT, my parents had gotten my homework for the next couple of weeks in an effort to keep up with others in the school. However, because of FOT activities and being away from school, still trying to keep up in school, this brings me up to another major issue. I was an extremely athletically and gifted child in all phases of sports, yet I could not compete in grade school basketball where my ability in the sport was not able to be used because of being unable to attend practices and such because of the rules and regulations of the church, those being the need to attend church superseded any other activities, events, of which just happened to be on the same days as the events from school. Therefore because of attending church I could not participate in activities for school. Okay, all done. I am not going to sit here and waste your time with any more sniveling.
My parents were probably some of the best of the group. I can remember horror stories from other kids in the church whose parents beat them sadistically like animals as I have read in other stories that made me tear up as well as made me laugh. Many of you have written you wish you had some of the parents who are the enlightened parents. I think mine were those. I can remember as a little boy sitting there in the church and the ministers would give the speeches about child rearing. I used to sit there and cringe and think, "oh, this is not good for me". However, I got some good beatings from both parents and deserved everyone, especially from dad, who was an Air force Officer. Mom tended to lose her temper, but I had those coming too.
In those 12 years I guess I was like a lot of you. We attended church services in Akron, OH, Lexington, KY, Southern ILL and later in Kansas City. We attended the FOT in Jekyll Island, GA, Big Sandy, TX and the Lake of the Ozarks, MO. Those times were very interesting times in my youth. Like I have said before, my parents were more enlightened members of the church than some of the ones I have read about that talk about the 80's and 90's. By that time, however, we were long since gone. (more to come)

[thelawdog]

(more to come continued) . . .
I remember a time when we flew to Jekyll Island on a Quad prop plane and as we landed dad explained to me how the plane was working its magic. Of course dad was an Air Force pilot and understood how they worked. Later, when we went back to Missouri, we picked up grandma and we headed for Big Sandy, TX. Along the way, she stopped on the sides of roads where she had made us baked lemon or custard pies and picked up rocks from the downslide. We stayed in a trailer and slept out in the open air. Like the rest of you I listened to the "big A" and his son, Garner Ted, and the long winded windbag, Waterhouse, who bored me just as much as he bored you. Jesus %#@#(! Christ.
I guess about the time of the early 70's the great disillusionment that the world was not going to end in 1972, was the time I slid off the roof for good. Of course at that time I was a teenage boy, the rebellious times of all kids lives, and I started to get involved in smoking pot. We were at that time in the Kansas City church. Mom had fell off the church before I had. Every now and then I would go with my dad. However, I had started to fall in with people who would be regarded as "worldly friends". My last FOT had been the 1974 Lake of the Ozarks and in 1975, when I was a senior in high school in Kansas City, mom and dad attended the church in Tucson, AZ. From that point I was already gone and they followed shortly after.
PS: From that time on I was like the prodigal child. My life became all about sex, drugs, gambling and rock and roll. When I was in college, attending a Big 10 University, I was number one boy for a Jewish kid, who was the local "juice main" in a gambling racket. I picked up all the losers and paid off all the winners. I guess I was like the kid in the bible, as stated, the prodigal son. I tried to do everything the church told me was good in the opposite direction. I used LSD, drank, smoked marijuana, and was extremely promiscuous with women. In the end I ended up being a Federal Law Enforcement officer and I knew a lot of the characters many of you would know to be mobsters, and others like Tim McVey. Now I am retired. My days have come and gone. All the days of the FOT are now a long strange haze in the back of my memory.
We are not little kids listening to Gerald Waterhouse giving us those 3 hour sermons anymore. I know, it is hard for many of you. Thank God I did not have to live in the 80's and 90's when the WWCOG seemed to delve in the extreme political correctness of that time period. I was off rebuking what I was dealt with in the WWCOG. I wish you all much love, you and the brethren, because in the end that is all there is.