Verizon FiOS manipulates time and reality — and still mangles the customer experience

Verizon FiOS manipulates time and reality — and still mangles the customer experience

My internet service went down Sunday night. Verizon’s messages about the outage seemed to emanate from a twilight zone where time and reality have no meaning. I’m a Verizon FiOS customer. FiOS is extremely reliable — it’s never gone down in over five years. That’s good, because my business, my family’s work, and all my…

Yahoo for Verizon: A soporific press release fails to inspire anyone

Yahoo for Verizon: A soporific press release fails to inspire anyone

Verizon bought Yahoo to combine with AOL and build an online media empire from cast-off spare parts. But its new management can’t seem to write a press release that’s credible, let alone run a media company anyone would visit on purpose. Here’s the logo for the new brand: Because apparently Verizon Media Group, formerly known…

Some stuff that doesn’t matter and some stuff that does

Some stuff that doesn’t matter and some stuff that does

I was just thinking about what matters and what doesn’t matter, because, being human, we get it wrong a lot. It doesn’t matter whether the new Yahoo/AOL product from Verizon is called “Oath.” What matters is if Verizon can take a bunch of lame and aging properties and make them relevant again. If they don’t,…

My cord cutting experience (and the bullshit that came with it)

My cord cutting experience (and the bullshit that came with it)

Last week I was a TV subscriber with a landline phone. Now I stream my TV and have much faster Internet. This transition was a lot harder than it sounded because service providers deceived me. Streaming your TV sounds like a simple idea. Our viewing is nearly all broadcast channels like Fox, premium channels like HBO,…

Verizon just bought AOL’s “global multiscreen network platform”

Verizon just bought AOL’s “global multiscreen network platform”

Holy cow. A phone company bought the original Internet content company. This has to have some broader significance. Look in the obligatory press release and you find . . . nothing. Except for some indigestible chunks of verbiage (thanks to Barak Kassar for pointing this out): . . . the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a…