“AOL had a business model that brought users in to the internet and wouldn’t let them out when they figured out that they didn’t need it.”
i laughed at AOL’s last desperate move before their complete failure, which was: “We now have high speed internet” ... which of course was marked up at a higher price than if one simply dumped AOL and paid for high speed internet directly from an ISP ... even at that embryonic stage of the Internet, AOL was a tiny pond compared to the world oceans of the Internet ...
the “merger” itself was total insanity because it was completely obvious that AOL was a dead man walking for anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the modern gold rush of the big communication corporations that were busily wiring up the world with high speed internet
once again, such insanity proved that most corporate leaders are completely ignorant morons living exclusively in a bubble of their own hollow ego ...
Most every one of us who recognized the folly for what it was, immediately, were actually previous AOL customers, who had already left for better methods of accessing the actual internet. AOL had been a sort of combination of internet and old school bulletin board, that it had originally excelled at, but those days were over. Most of us couldn’t stand the smugness of AOL CEO Scott Case either, and were actually rooting for their inevitable collapse. As you said, not only was it funny, it was celebrated.