Shame on AOL, shame on AOL, shame on AOL.
I had already almost no respect for this company, its services and products (I’m speaking about AOL, not Winamp ;-), but THIS…. BetaNews published yesterday an interesting article – Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp – about the catastrophic integration of Winamp in AOL. As a quite fanatic user of Winamp since years, this article sounds desperate concerning the future of this great tool. Again, a very bad example of an integration of a little structure (Winamp) with its own history, people and efficient way of working, in a big and fat monster (AOL), as usual with the same consequences: no values generated for the monster, no future for the people of the little structure, and a VERY BAD SERVICE for the customer!!
The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.
Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.
Winamp’s abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.
The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn’t long until the two ideologies collided.
Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.
Despite the somber farewell, Nullsoft’s former masterminds are proud of their accomplishments. Winamp helped start a digital audio revolution and boasts an incredible 60 million users per month.
After a disappointing Winamp3, Nullsoft developers returned to the drawing board and completed long-standing goals with the release of Winamp 5.0 in late 2003.
[…] Without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.