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They set her up with AOL because it was the cheapest and simplest online solution available and besides, they didn't have to use it, and "granny" didn't know better.

Oh absolutely.. Their business model seemed (to me at least) to rely almost solely on people who didn't have a clue. (But once they got a clue, they split like the house was on fire)

For the complete, total beginner it's perfect.. Just put in the disk, what could be simpler?

People progress through the newbie stage pretty fast though.. (especially after a hige bill for "online minutes") I think their ability to learn completely blindsided AOL.

Another factor, I think, is that in the early days, at least, AOL provided a lot of content that wasn't also out on the web. I signed up on AOL in 1994. At that time, they were already huge, but the www barely existed. I remember when it was also a big deal that AOL finally offered a web browser (a really sucky one, we came to discover) and you could go out into the deep water, only to find there wasn't much out there to see.

I kept AOL way longer than I should have, mostly because I'd established my e-mail address on there and didn't want to change it. Ditched it last spring when I got DSL. Now, most of the people I know who still have it are getting ready to ditch. What AOL does still offer are some communities (similar to FR), but the corporation is consistently hostile to them--they take up space and don't buy stuff.