Betas are popular in the Internet media business as a way to rush new products to market. Is there a danger in that?
No, people should be more open. Betas are great. It exposes people to innovation that's happening here. You're never going to be absolutely perfect, so there's a lot of value in exposing it to your user base, because they're loyal and they want to test it. That's something that everyone should be embracing.
Much has been made about email storage capacity competitively — Google's Gmail blew the door off standard rates, then others followed. Why is storage so cheap now?
AOL has an existing email service. We've gotten good over the years at scaling and managing a large-scale service, and AIM mail will benefit from that know-how.
Spam has crept into IM. How do you stop it, or prevent it from getting worse?
Spam on IM, or spim, is something we take great pains so that our users don't have to deal with it. The victims of spim have typically been on other networks. The reason is, we've attacked spim the same way we've attacked spam on our network.
We have techniques to monitor messages sent from one account. We have a feature to report IM spam, and we can lock down that offending spimmer.
In the constellation of your rivals — Hotmail, Yahoo and Google — how do you see AOL?
With the launch of mail, we think we'll turn up the heat on our rivals. We'll force consumers to ask themselves: 'Do I want a separate IM experience that's not connected to email? And yet another application to do a VoIP call?' It should all be integrated, and we're the only ones that have done it.
As AOL becomes more of a Web operation, doesn't that detract from your subscription AOL service?
No, I think we're building a Web audience — because it's a valuable asset to have that, so that we can capture this burgeoning and robust advertising business. But it's not at the expense of our subscription service.
On another front, how will you catch up with the phenomenal success of Skype's VoIP service, which has more than 30 million users so far?
Here is the perfect example. A consumer who already has, on average, 150 people to 200 people on their buddy list — we're increasing this to 250 in this version and by the time of (full release) it will be 400 buddies — it's as simple as clicking on that name and hitting call.
With other applications, you have to call on the landline, etc. With VoIP integration into AIM, I just click on your name, and you and I are talking in seconds.
Why do you think IM is so promising or the best vehicle for combining all these services?
IM is so promising because it's the doorway for all the other forms of communication. If people are loyal to AIM, and it can be more things like email and blogging, then we become your doorway to communicate.
People don't give us credit for this, but AIM is really part of popular culture, it's something we should all celebrate.
