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by James Fallows

(IDG) -- Alan Cooper, the head of Cooper Interaction Design in Palo Alto, Calif., has nothing against Microsoft (MSFT) . After all, he developed MS Visual Basic many years ago. But he does have some advice for his old company. When Microsoft introduced Windows 95 four years ago, it featured the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" song in the promotional hoopla. Right group, Cooper says, but wrong song. A better anthem for Microsoft, he wryly suggests, would have been the Stones' "Winning Ugly." ("... Back in the dressing room the other side is weeping.")

Cooper meant this as a plea for better-designed software, but it may be more useful as a description of reality. It's increasingly clear that winning ugly – getting the basic job done, without worrying about style or panache – is in fact the way to the top in the Internet Economy.

Yes, there are counterexamples. 3Com (COMS) 's Palm V flew out of stores solely because of its sex appeal, and the Macintosh survives largely on styling in the broadest sense, notably a more elegant operating system. But there's a longer record the other way: the IBM (IBM) PC kicking the Mac around, the rise of MS-DOS. In the Net world, it's the success of America Online (AOL) .

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AOL (AOL) is increasingly the Net's answer to Microsoft. It is the one steadily profitable firm in a field otherwise ruined by commodity pricing, the one organization never to lose its focus on building market share. No one thinks of either AOL or Microsoft as stylish; people envy each company's success. The growing similarity between these titans whets our appetite for an eventual King Kong vs. Godzilla showdown. It also explains some of the logic behind the features built into – and left out of – the new AOL 5.0.

AOL's upgrade history has stuck to the winning-ugly strategy. At any given time, users have had an assortment of wish-list items and gripes, which AOL handled lethargically, if at all. For example, until recently the Windows versions of the software offered no way to alphabetize your address book, which made it virtually useless. But the company recognized that at some point problems could become severe enough that users would stop complaining and would actually leave. At that point, but not earlier, AOL would come alive.

Three years ago, the emergency that threatened the system was chronic busy signals. This came as a result of AOL having solved a different kind of problem, switching from hourly fees to flat-rate pricing. "America Offline" was for a while the butt of late-night TV humor, but within a few months, and with many hundreds of millions of dollars, the problem was solved.

A year and a half ago, the impending crisis was the flood of porno spam that AOL seemed helpless to control. Whatever the company did, it worked – spam levels now seem no worse than anywhere else.

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Jonathan Sacks, an AOL senior VP, said last week that because of AOL's mass, nonexpert audience, it has to be slow in tinkering with anything it isn't absolutely forced to change. A major redesign, he added, "is like going into someone's house and moving the doorknobs 3 feet to the right. We have to be careful that whatever we do is evolutionary rather than revolutionary."

From this perspective, it's impressive that AOL has innovated as much as it has with version 5. It has added new features like a Web-based calendar and a "You've Got Pictures" system for receiving digital photos developed at the local drugstore – while also dealing with user complaints about navigation (fewer clicks to get from opening screen to what you're looking for) and screen names (now seven per user account, not five).

But I can tell you what left-out feature will cause the next emergency that makes AOL scramble: The rest of the online industry is rapidly moving toward a "machine-agnostic" model. It shouldn't matter where you're working or whether you're using a desktop, laptop or PDA. The Net will be the same and will give you the information you want. But on AOL, the specific machine still matters tremendously. If you go on a two-week business trip, sending and receiving e-mail on your laptop, there is no easy way to get at that same mail from your desktop machine back home. [There is a laborious solution, explained below.]

Soon people will prepare to leave AOL because this oddity keeps them from using it for their work. Just before they go, the company will cobble together a "synchronization" solution that keeps them on board. The process will probably be ugly, and AOL will probably win again.