ISPs who suck, ISP Hall of Shame, FreeAV, 1stup.com, AltaVista
ISPs who suck, ISP Hall of Shame, FreeAV, 1stup.com, AltaVista
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In the wake of my AT&T@Home cable modem disaster and the Freewwweb bungle, I endured a rather grim stretch of time booting Windows (yuck!) and running crummy Windows-based free ISP clients. Since I only have one POTS line, this ties up my phone line for hours. I gave out a decent voice mailbox number to my friends and family during the interim.
FreeAV was AltaVista's ill-fated attempt in providing free Internet connectivity was back in the days of AltaVista's ill-fated attempt in being a big Internet portal like Yahoo! or MSN.
Most of these free ISPs have a crummy banner-ad scrolling "control bar" that pops up to the top. Some of them had inactivity timeouts; essentially, if you didn't click on one of their crappy ads occasionally, it would hang up. Tick off your customers by forcing them to look at ads. Great business model, guys! Now, why do think so many people think television sucks? Hmmm?
You can't have just one of these free ISPs. You need three or four of them because one ISP's modem point-of-presence server would die. These outages were happening more often. Increasing frequency of problems = bad.
Return-Path: freeaccess@memberupdates.altavista.com
Delivery-Date: Tue Dec 05 08:48:24 2000
Delivered-To: user@localhost
Received: (qmail 11876 invoked from network); 5 Dec 2000 08:48:24 -0000
Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1)
by localhost with SMTP; 5 Dec 2000 08:48:24 -0000
Received: from mail.brightmail.com [209.157.160.17]
by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.6.0)
for user@localhost (single-drop); Tue, 05 Dec 2000 00:48:24 -0800 (PST)
Received: from transit.ecdm.com (transit.ecdm.com [64.41.250.200])
by smv12.iname.net (8.9.3/8.9.1SMV2) with SMTP id DAA17503
for <user@domain.com> sent by
<freeaccess@memberupdates.altavista.com>
Tue, 5 Dec 2000 03:36:53 -0500 (EST)
To: user@domain.com
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 00:33:57 -0800 (PST)
From: AltaVista <freeaccess@memberupdates.altavista.com>
Subject: Free Access Discontinuance
Mime-Version: 1.0
Dear Member,
We regret to inform you that AltaVista's free Internet access will
terminate service on December 10th. AltaVista has been forced to
discontinue this offering because the company who provided the service
and telecommunications infrastructure for it, 1stUp Corp., is going out
of business. This change will not affect the availability of our search
services at AltaVista.com
AltaVista thoroughly investigated finding another supplier to provide a
free Internet access service. However, we were unable to find a company
that was able to meet the needs of our Members.
[boring MSN sales pitch omitted]
AltaVista Search
We look forward to continuing to provide you with our patented Search
technology for finding information on the Web and product research
through our shopping-comparison guide at:
http://memberupdates.altavista.com/Key=6192.xSt.J.CNPInT
On behalf of all AltaVista employees, we thank you for choosing
AltaVista.
Sincerely,
[Marketing Person]
AltaVista
Buh bye! Oh, and thanks for the FC points for yours truly. Woohoo!
200 people laid off (approximately 25 percent) = 154 FC points!
Dot.combomb incubator incinerator CMGI (NASDAQ: CMGI) share price hits a new 52-week low today at $1.75.
Before there was Google, there was AltaVista. And before there was AltaVista, there wasn't anything at all.
CMGI acquired AltaVista from Compaq/DEC and tried to turn it from a pretty good search engine to a mega-portal. They failed. They dumped the free Internet access and clobbered their ambitious portal plans. Now, they're just a mediocre search engine. Unlike Google, AltaVista indexes are full of dead links and they don't cache pages.
Thanks for the generous and continuous stream of FC points!
What happens when a steady stream of senior executives flee moribund search engine company, and onetime wannabee mega-portal, AltaVista.com? 160 FC points!
James Barnett, former president of MyFamily.com is appointed the new AltaVista CEO; another 30 percent of the staff (160 employees) got their pink slips. 155 FC points!
CMGI (NASDAQ: CMGI) share price closes at a new 52-week low today at exactly one American greenback with an intraday low of $0.98.
Hmmm, maybe the market is reacting to CMGI's $1.4 billion loss in Q4. 170 FC points!
CMGI (NASDAQ: CMGI) share price continues to free fall and closes at a new 52-week low today $0.71 with an intraday low of $0.68.
Rumor has it that AltaVista's e-tailer site Shopping.com will be packing it in at the end of the month. 190 FC points and induction into the Hall of Fame!
Reports are emerging that AltaVista hasn't updated its search engine database since July. Big deal. They keep broken links in their databases for many months, sometimes even years. The search engine is virtually unusable now because of all the cruft it contains. Oddly, the media seems to think this is news.
Attention journalists: this is not news. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that AltaVista's search engine is worthless.
Deep-sixing practically the last of its portal features, AltaVista is clobbering its free e-mail service. Damn, how lame can you get?!? Oh yes, 171 FCpoints.
In other related news, beleaguered parent company CMGI (NASDAQ: CMGI) has appointed George McMillan as CEO, replacing the highly ineffective dot-com era dinosaur, David Wetherell (who, of course, remains as chairman of the board).
175 FC points for CMGI (NASDAQ: CMGI) who lost $5.5 billion last year. In a stunning moment of irony, CEO Wetherell will step down on 1 March 2002, i.e., MarchFirst.
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| Last modified on
Mon Aug 9 00:23:14 GMT 2004
by tarahertz@yahoo.com |
Copyright © 1999-2003 Tara Hertz. All rights reserved. |
ISPs who suck, ISP Hall of Shame, FreeAV, 1stup.com, AltaVista