AOL: 超巨大ネット・ビジネスの全貌

著者 : カーラ・スウィッシャー 山崎理仁

• 早川書房 (2000年3月1日発売)

作品紹介・あらすじ

先端テクノロジーで情報を配信するビジネスの可能性を、いち早く予見していたAOL(アメリカ・オンライン)。斬新なマーケティング手法で爆発的にシェアを伸ばした同社は、インターネット革命の波に乗り、いまや世界最大かつ最強のネット企業へと成長した。しかし、その道のりは危機また危機の連続だった。オンライン・サービスの先駆者コンピュサーブとの会員獲得競争、WEBポルノの責任をめぐる裁判、接続トラブルに対する苦情の山、ネットスケープの買収、ヤフーなど新進ポータルの追撃、そしてビル・ゲイツの脅迫…野心渦巻くコンピュータ業界で波瀾の歴史を歩んできたAOL。卓越したヴィジョンと強い信念を持つプロフェッショナルたちの人間ドラマを生き生きと描き、AOLの強さの秘密に迫る話題沸騰のビジネス・サクセス・ストーリー。

感想・レビュー・書評

[sasakiarchtjpさんの感想 · 2010年2月24日]

内容（「BOOK」データベースより）
先端テクノロジーで情報を配信するビジネスの可能性を、いち早く予見していたAOL(アメリカ・オンライン)。斬新なマーケティング手法で爆発的にシェアを伸ばした同社は、インターネット革命の波に乗り、いまや世界最大かつ最強のネット企業へと成長した。しかし、その道のりは危機また危機の連続だった。オンライン・サービスの先駆者コンピュサーブとの会員獲得競争、WEBポルノの責任をめぐる裁判、接続トラブルに対する苦情の山、ネットスケープの買収、ヤフーなど新進ポータルの追撃、そしてビル・ゲイツの脅迫…野心渦巻くコンピュータ業界で波瀾の歴史を歩んできたAOL。卓越したヴィジョンと強い信念を持つプロフェッショナルたちの人間ドラマを生き生きと描き、AOLの強さの秘密に迫る話題沸騰のビジネス・サクセス・ストーリー。
内容（「MARC」データベースより）
野心渦巻くコンピュータ業界で波瀾の歴史を歩んできたネット企業、AOL(アメリカ・オンライン)。卓越したヴィジョンと強い信念を持つプロフェッショナルたちの人間ドラマを生き生きと描き、AOLの強さの秘密に迫る。
Amazon.com
AOL's story--from its origins in a doomed gaming service through its early appearance as a much-dismissed startup to its current status as an often-maligned giant--is as irresistible as a heroic comedy. Kara Swisher chronicles the surprising growth of the world's largest online service, an organization for which everything apparently went wrong.
The company has run into obstacles at every step of the way--partners who failed to give necessary support or who even turned hostile, and competition from a multitude of corporate Goliaths (including Bill Gates, who declared that he could either buy AOL or bury it). Worst of all, AOL has created a cascading sequence of operational and technical blunders, often offending or infuriating the people they most need to survive; yet the company still manages to dominate the online service industry.

Swisher speculates that one main factor enabled AOL to succeed against overwhelming odds: the superior vision of marketing executive Steve Case. While other online services focused on games, shopping, and business, AOL worked on building community and interpersonal contacts. This service proved valuable enough to outweigh the company's mistakes and misfortunes.

However, it is this same focus that has also brought on many of AOL's problems. Swisher describes AOL's struggles with the seamier side of online life--people who use the service for criminal activities and for discussing raunchy sexual issues. Swisher also discusses the problems that come with too much success, such as the overload of users that routinely slows down or completely crashes the system, the backlash on the Internet when masses of netiquette-challenged AOLers appeared in cliquish newsgroups, and the national outrage when a technical problem brought down the entire service for many hours.

With its cast of fascinating and quirky characters, including Steve Case, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Alexander Haig, aol.com is a captivating look at all the human, cultural, and sometimes just plain quixotic factors that created this unlikely giant. --Elizabeth Lewis
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

From Publishers Weekly
Through tenacity and brilliant marketing, America Online bested competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe to become the way most Americans reach the Internet, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Swisher's gripping cyber-saga. The author, who has also covered AOL and the Internet for the Washington Post since 1994, conducted interviews with AOL's top executives, among others, and divulges details of AOL's rebuff of a 1993 buyout attempt by billionaire stakeholder Paul G. Allen, a cofounder of Microsoft. Microsoft famously waffled during the Net's infancy, and Allen's better-known partner, Bill Gates, predicted AOL's demise that same year. Then, paradoxically, Gates angled to buy or at least control the floundering company, but AOL bounded back. Chief executive Steve Case relentlessly focused on building "community" (via chat rooms and message boards) and unleashed a risky but inspired mailing campaign, a "carpet-bombing" of the U.S. with over 250 million free AOL disks for going online with AOL software. Swisher frankly reviews AOL's questionable accounting and billing practices, such as switching customers to higher rates without their consent, as well as customers' manifold grievances, yet he maintains that AOL has mended its ways. Although she admits that "Steve CaseAand by extensionAAOL, is so middle-of-the-road, so bland, so vanilla," Swisher's account makes the computer wars seem as seductive, treacherous and unpredictable as the Web itself. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。
Book Description
In 1996, Kara Swisher, then a reporter at The Washington Post, was granted unprecedented access to one of the hottest and most closely watched companies in the world, America Online, Inc. In aol.com, Swisher has written a book that captures the secrets of how AOL beat the competition and became the world's biggest online company. Swisher also reveals the company's behind-the-scenes dealings with Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, CompuServe, Prodigy, Netscape, and the Christian Right.
Throughout its existence, AOL has repeatedly been written off by the media and the high-tech world. Bill Gates threatened to buy it or bury it. Deep-pocketed competitors such as CompuServe and Prodigy thought little of their smaller rival. And AOL made matters worse by committing a series of public-relations and technical blunders that became front page news and enraged its subscribers.

But the company--a "cyber-cockroach"--refused to die. Now, with over eleven million subscribers, AOL is the undisputed leader in the online world, vitally positioned at the nexus of big business, high tech, advertising, and new media. In telling the story of AOL, Swisher also conveys the fascinating history of the online business, which has its origins in the dreams of an eccentric and little-known entrepreneur named Bill Von Meister, whose grand ideas and big spending spawned the fledgling company that would become AOL. But it fell to a young marketing executive named Steve Case to build AOL while fending off an onslaught of wealthier competitors and suitors. Ultimately, as Swisher vividly illustrates, AOL gained supremacy because Case possessed the best vision for his company, establishing AOL as a vibrant virtual community rather than an online shopping center or business tool. Included in that community is an array of enthusiasts, activists, and deviants who at times clash in battles over freedom of expression and family values, a flash point best illustrated here by AOL's fight against the Communications Decency Act.

Re-creating all of the major moments in AOL's frenzied history, aol.com is a fascinating and important inside story about the birth of a new medium, the enterprising innovators who are leading it, and the way it is changing our culture.
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

From the Back Cover
Advance Praise for aol.com

"Kara Swisher's book could not be more timely. The history of AOL is a tale of death barely averted on numerous occasions. The company's recent market ascendancy is nothing less than a miraculous, and a testament to the rewards of 'carpet bomb' marketing."
--Randall Stross, author of The Microsoft Way
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
About the Author
Kara Swisher has covered AOL and the Internet for the business section of The Washington Post since 1994. Now reporting on Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal, she lives in San Francisco.
--このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。