ls. Senior management misjudged the response to its offer of flat-rate charges for unlimited use, and the company even suffered class-action lawsuits after their access systems were overwhelmed in many areas. Seeking the greatest number of subscribers and offering to highlight advertisers willing to pay for AOL's assistance is a strategy that ensures AOL's continued financial good health. AOL's functional strategy of being indispensable to subscribers is one that can work to ensure the company's continued growth. Already, AOL has more content than does any other ISP (Anonymous, 2000), and it seeks only to grow in scope. It continually asks members for new ideasfor things that would make the service even more valuable to them. Though many companies do such direct market research, AOL is unusual in that it acts on the suggestions it receives. A large part of the reason that AOL is even able to act so quickly is that much of the content within AOL is donated by members. Several types of chatrooms are monitored to ensure that participants adhere toAOL's terms of use, and many of those monitoring discussions are volunteers working from home. Few other corporate entities could elicit such volunteerism from its customers and would need instead vast financial resources to ccomplish many of the same things that AOL already can do for little or no cost. Volunteers surely must believe that they are contributing to the good of society and furthering the possibilities of the Internet – not only are they not paid for theirtime and expertise that they freely give to AOL and the entire AOL community, ...
