I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people ar

I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people are calling to say "I called the local telecom and ordered DSL/Cable direct, close my account", they're trying to negotiate customer retention from the back foot. I know plenty of people held onto AOL for a long time because of specific communities-- their chat service was more accessible than IRC, and as mentioned elsewhere, tying it to a bill and an identity was a good way to keep it from getting too toxic. My family held out until 2006 or so because of one such community. We were willing to put up with 56k slowness until I got a webdev position and needed the ability to do work-from-home with a reasonable turnaround. There was a definite point though where you could tell they had decided to give up on investment. The client was ever buggier and weirder, they stopped offering Usenet, and their internal forum system got retooled in a way that nobody really liked. I suspect at the end, the chat service was probably their last moat for their userbase.