On Wed, 26 February 2014, at 8:29 pm, Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> wrote: > … > * Netscape (under AOL) aimed at becoming a pseudo-OS on top of Windows. > We know how that turned out.
You appear to be underestimating it - whilst the AOL suite was hated by many of those "forced to use it" (I guess in the late 90's or early 00's), it is / was so massively popular with grannies that it is still available today. Dial-up division is still AOL's most profitable division, earning them $500m per year,[1] and I would attribute the popularity of the AOL desktop suite to this. I've seen this profitability attributed to "misinformed customers" who "don't know they no-longer need AOL now they have DSL", but having been told by a number of people that all they want out of their computer is their AOL, I find it had to agree with that characterisation. AOL's desktop suite has certainly not been a failure for the company. Stroller. [1] http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/02/18/aol-dial-up-profits/
