LooseSuits

you should ask that girl if she has any real arguments about not liking apple. it's the same thing as a "bad advice that sounds good" (c) Aaron Wall. If you say something, you must have some arguments for back-up. Other than that i think it's mainly because of the thing being ant-{something popular}. Some of the friends i have are strictly against apple as well. and their only argument is "because everyone is raving about it".

I only dislike companies if I've never ever have a positive experience with them. It gets to a point that they would have to REALLY just start kissing my ass before I'll even think about dealing with them again.

Outback Steakhouse is on my crap list. The last couple times I've gone the food was either severely undercooked or literally BURNT. The last time I went, the manager commented somewhere along the lines of "what do you expect" so I left and never went back.

The Apple haters I find seem to be REALLY lacking in updated knowledge. I had a friend of mine who HATED Apple Co. based on his experience on a MAC CLASSIC! I handed him my laptop running OS X and last check, he ownes 2 iPods and a Mac Mini that he uses alongside his PC.

It's all about experiences with a company. If a company burns me and leaves me for dead, I am very, very slow to change my opinion of then. Especially anything in the tech field where there are 15 other companies waiting to take its place.

AOL burned me for a number I reasons I listed in a comment on your article.
The short version is this. Their customer support was a nightmare. Their overspamming the world with CDs and causing their phone lines to become jammed so people paying for the service could not get on for hours at a time. The fast-bloating software that took over any machine you put it on. And did I mention the time I could see their Dulles, VA headquarters but not connect. Yes, I know their modem banks weren't necessarily there. But still, it's something to be able to shake an angry fist at a corporation's HQ.

In their defense, they did create an amazing instant messaging service. I can't say client because I've long abandoned it since they added advertising to it in favor of Gaim/Pidgin and Adium.

Microsoft's Xbox division holds a special place of hatred in my heart too because they sold me (and everyone else) a flawed product. I love my Xbox 360 more than most people I meet. But they sold me a lemon. It was going to die (and has twice). That just stinks of wrong! Don't sell a product you KNOW is going to fail. Fix it, then sell it.

Microsoft's Windows have been the bain of my existence since I was young and knew enough to know there was better out there. But I also am in awe of their engineers for making a product that can run on... anything! And for supporting as many things as it does, software and hardware.

And do I even need to mention phone companies. I've been with Alltel and Verizon. Both of which I could go on about but everyone has their own "got beaten and mugged by a phone company" story. So I won't. But they all get their special place in hell too. Not as far down as AOL, but close, and closing in by the day.

I hate plenty of companies. Whenever a company makes my life more complicated, harder, or less successful I build more and more distaste. The farther that's gone, the less likely I am to trust them in the future (changes or not.)

I do give them second chances... but I'm wary. And some companies have so many years of making things difficult for me that I'll probably never fully trust them. Microsoft, American Airlines, Cell companies... there's a big list.

The problem is that a good portion of large corporations have gotten to the point of completely ignoring the needs and wants of their customers. This will lead to their downfall, but unfortunately most of them in this state have so much moment built up that it will be a while before we start to see them mend their ways.

Why do people still hate AOL? Because they keep on messing up - what have they done that qualified for forgiveness for the millions of people they burnt?

2005 - Laying off employees but they had the money to purchase Weblogs Inc.
2006 - They showed complete disregard for people's privacy.
2006 - Large amount of layoffs
2007 - Laying off 2000 people. Thousands of entries like this one about the layoffs over the years.
2007 - Not giving the sponsorship they historically gave and committed 80K to (they said it was in the budget and due to past success it wasn't questioned). They canceled only giving 30 days notice.

"Usually they are very proactive about this and they are very involved in all the details," Parent said. "The understanding was that if AOL couldn't participate we'd have ample notice, so that's the kind of relationship we had. I could tell clearly the new person's approach wasn't at all like what we experienced in the past."

2007 - AOL decided to move from Virginia to NY and become an ad company. Oops, that's not working (but they sold 540M in ads for 3rd Qtr).

The list is long. AOL has over 100M unique pageviews but:

AOL also trails all but Yahoo in page view growth — and Yahoo's decline is partly attributable to its increased use of Ajax, which delivers updates to users without requiring a new page. In search, AOL is behind those three as well

Hard to have sympathy/faith/trust for a company that made 540M in the 3rd qtr alone (that's over a billion a year), has over 100M uniques (that's a lot of people still using their services) and still isn't successful (they are losing money). What exactly do they need to get it right?

While there are a lot of companies that I don't really care for, there's only a handful of companies that I could actually say that I hate. Microsoft would be one of them (every time I have to use a computer running Windows I inevitably get so frustrated with it that I feel like strangling someone, and very few companies are able to make me feel like that on a regular basis), along with Aeroplan, The Gap, Rogers, and a few others that I can't remember right now.

Actually, peroty in attack of AOL, I think they acquired the technology for AIM through ICQ. So I wouldn't give AOL all the credit there.

Tyme: Back in the day AOL was one of the few ISP's out there so it was easy for them to make a profit If you consider that AOL was able to charge $25 a month for dial up service. That business model goes out the window when local cable companies start to provide broadband internet.

At this point a lot of technical people don't like AOL cause it's kind of slow and tech support sucks but that's because they're big. People complain about poor tech support so they hire more and more people to cover the lines. This raises costs.

Flash forward the ISP business model doesn't work out so hot so they have to start cutting back cause they want to be a web only comp. Tyme you talk about how essential it is to have a small team on 9rules/web only comp. AOL lays off 700 workers at their call center. This makes perfect business sense. If you're not going to be an ISP (google does not provide free telephone customer support) cutting those technical support jobs makes perfect sense. I mean no one likes lay offs but the purchase of weblogs inc is a good future investment towards their future.

Not giving sponsorships: probably because they have less money than before. it's embarrassing but, I mean they don't have the money.

The privacy. "They showed complete disregard for people's privacy." You make it sound like they did it on purpose. Sounds like they just messed up big time. If I remember correctly, they leaked a bunch of search data from their search engine.m

Advertising model not working? You said it yourself that they made $540 million. a 13 percent increase. the article made it sound like their "ad network" wasn't doing so well cause outside companies were doing in house ads but that AOL's own site ads weren't doing so shabby.