AOL OpenRide

~ the obit ~

AOL released OpenRide on 4 october 2006, free, Windows only, with an AOL or AIM screen name required to get at most of it. The premise was one window divided into four panes. People, which was your AIM buddy list. Email, which would take accounts from other providers as well as AOL's. A web browser pane running AOL Explorer on Microsoft's Trident engine. And a media pane for AOL's video library, Radio@AOL, and whatever was on your own hard drive.

The panes resized against each other through a control AOL named the Dynasizer, so pulling the browser larger squeezed everything else down. That is the one thing everybody who used it remembers, partly because the name is ridiculous and partly because it was the only genuinely novel idea in the product. The rest was a restatement, in 2006, of the argument AOL had been making since 1993: that the internet should arrive as one application with a company's name on it.

It was gone almost immediately. In late may 2007, less than six months after launch, AOL pulled OpenRide off its official download page while continuing to support it on the help pages. In late july 2007 the company announced a replacement called AOL Helix, which shipped as AOL Desktop. By december 2007 an OpenRide user could no longer log in to the AOL network for mail or instant messaging at all, and the application was finished.

None of this reached me, because AOL never operated in Turkey. There was no local number to dial, no CD in a magazine, no AOL account to have. My internet came from TTNet and my chat came from MSN Messenger, and the entire American experience of the internet as a walled program you launched was something I only ever read about afterwards. By 2006 I was twenty-two, at university, on broadband, and running a browser like everybody else. That is exactly the customer OpenRide was built to win back, and it had nothing to offer one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

Context matters here. AOL announced in 2006 that it was giving away the services it had been charging dial-up subscribers for, because the subscribers were leaving for broadband and taking their monthly bill with them. The new plan was advertising: keep the users, drop the fee, sell against whatever attention was left. OpenRide was the software half of that plan. It was aimed at people who already had a broadband connection from somebody else, and its job was to make them spend their time inside AOL's window anyway.

The problem is that the window had nothing they needed. Mail was moving to Gmail, which ran in a browser tab. Instant messaging was AIM, which people already had as a standalone program and did not want bundled. Video was going to YouTube, which Google bought five days after OpenRide launched. A suite only makes sense when the parts are better together, and by 2006 every part was better somewhere else.

~ the postmortem ~

AOL Desktop replaced it and dropped everything that made it distinct. The Dynasizer went. So did the multi-pane layout it was built around, and the Media Center with it. What survived was a conventional client, and AOL Desktop itself ran for years afterwards as a paid product sold to people who had never stopped paying AOL for anything.

There is a detail in the launch that explains a lot. The browser pane ran AOL Explorer, and AOL Explorer was already dead. It had shipped in july 2005 and been discontinued during 2006, so OpenRide came out of the gate in october built on a component the same company had stopped working on. Nobody at AOL appears to have thought that was a problem worth solving before shipping.

~ the long tail ~

The four-pane window did not die with the product, it just moved. Slack and Discord and every workplace tool built after them are single windows partitioned into a people list and a message area, with a content pane alongside, all of it resized by dragging the borders. The idea was never wrong. What was wrong was whose name was on the outside of it, and the assumption that people wanted their mail and their friends supplied by their internet provider.

AOL got there thirteen years too early and from the losing side of the transition. A company shedding dial-up subscribers at speed had one asset left, which was habit, and OpenRide was an attempt to package habit as software. Fourteen months later the download link was gone.

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