Too bad their takeaway seems to have been “people are stupid” rather than “people had a point”. If AOL couldn’t make a useful program that worked in offline mode, with a content cache loaded on-disc and updated with content regularly, they were totally missing out on the “mail magazines to houses annually” strategy of using those discs for more than just trash waste. But people don’t understand modems and it was easier to mock them than to build a better product.
Yep. Many greybeards around here have fought the battle of "Why do I need a modem to access AOL? I got a disk in the mail, that should be good enough!"