Personal Opinion (not necessarily the views of this forum or its members):
AOL, like MS, has had a strong foothold on the PC users for a long, long time.
In the late 80's and especially early 90's, they provided a great service to those just beginning to use their PC's power for communications. Prior to this most folks used "bulletin boards" via dial up modems. You'd simply call up each bulletin board, make a connection, then communicated, downloaded and uploaded stuff. You generally needed specific software for each site and many charged 'online' fees for use.
AOL, Compuserve and a few others were at the top in popularity and content. They were relatively easy to use and you could read the latest news, communicate with others (e-mail, chat forums, instant messaging, etc.) and connect to the internet.
However, AOL (and others) wanted you to use their services exclusively (they charged by the minute/hour) and sometimes made it difficult for you to navigate away from their site. In fact, AOL wanted you to think they were the internet!
This rather deceptively built up their subscriber base, especially among new and inexperienced users. Deceptive or not, they were very good at making their services easy and their software usually worked as well or better than others.
In those days (and maybe somewhat now) the real cost of providing dialup internet access was about $0.75/month for an ISP. Since AOL, Compuserve and others were charging by the hour (and eventually unlimited), they were making huge profits. Enough of a profit to eventually buy out other content services including Time, Warner, etc. (does this sound familiar?), and eventually kill-off much of the competition.
Today, the surviving content providers/ISPs still provide a valuable service to newbies as they really help them get started. Due to competition, their fees are more in line with other ISPs and they still also provide some of the better content (forums, IM, etc.).
Unfortunately like so many others, their software has become almost unmanageable. They try to provide too much with as little software engineering as possible (lazy programming). They want to keep your attention, so they make it an overpowering part of your PC when you install their software. It's difficult to remove, turn off or even understand the processes running in your system.
Dell
