Shawn: You were not there when I was talking to Leonsis, Miller, and Bankoff non-stop about how great Light AIM was and how we had to release it and show the world that we could make a range of products.
I fought for that for MONTHS, emailing and IMing folks like crazy. The same with the size of the client, our horrible uninstall issue, and the advertising screen real estate problems.
90% of what I did was bringing up the issue internally. Don’t you remember all the debates on the listsrvs? You know miller was on those lists and taking it all in right? Those debates wer not happening two or three years ago were they?
Now, did I come up with these debates? Not every time—not most times.
Did I fight non-stop to get people to a) look at the issue honestly and b) do the right thing? You bet I did!
Did I push folks hard to face the problems at AOL? Oh yes.
Did I pay the price for that? Many times.
I think the reason some folks feel like I was self-promotional at AOL was because many times I was the ONLY AOL EXECUTIVE talking to the public about the issues in an honest fashion. If I’m the only one in the conversation with the public the perception of my position goes up–way up.
I begged Ted to start a blog at the same time I talked to Mark Cuban about doing one–in 2004!!! When Ted came to blogging last year that put two raw AOL voices out there, and you’ll notice the attention started to come off me on every issue. People looked for Ted and Jason’s reaction to “the call” and “data valdez” — not just Jason’s.
Now we’ve got, what, 20 folks inside of AOL who are blogging about how they feel? That’s 20 voices talking about what they think we should do as a company–making me 1/20th of our blogosphere voice–not 100% or 50%.
Next time we make a mistake we’ll have 20-30 raw voices talking about it. We’re human again! The industry knows our names again… AOL was a big, old dumb company to many people in the industry 2-3 years ago–now we’re transparent, open, and… SMART!
That was my goal… to push folks to debate the issue, to fight for products, and to fight for the folks making the products.
If you’re the only one standing up you’re going to get the attention, but as you can see from this post you two guys are willing to go at it with a former SVP—I love it!!! Kick my ass… push me to do better… it’s all good!
I just wish you guys had taken me on six months ago!!!! The whole point of my time at AOL was to fire up folks like you to have a voice and that fact that you’re standing up to me make me smile. 🙂
I hope you guys keep up the spirit of debate and transparency long after I’m gone… give ’em hell!
best jason