Ignored Silicon Valley criticism of AOL's simplistic technology to create an all-in-one consumer on-line services company unrivaled for now: e-mail, on-line conferences, instant messaging, software, electronic newspapers, magazines, Internet access, original programming.
In how many of these can it sell its on-line services without breaking the law?
The BBC has become the most popular provider of on-line services in the UK.
Netscape is staffed by idealistic hackers, but AOL is a mass-market firm devoted to making on-line services unthreatening.
He had, in short, drastically changed his notion of a Microsoft Network as a proprietary place: "The On-line services business and the Internet have merged.
In the U.S., where enthusiasm for gardening continued to grow, gardeners "chatted over the fence" by using such on-line services as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe.
The two companies are already developing a range of cheap and portable Internet appliances that will enable people to use on-line services as routinely as they make a telephone call.
Big consumer on-line services spend as much as $200 to acquire each additional user, and then make profits per subscriber of a mere $6 or so a month.
Row after row of computers and peripheral equipment used to support the AOL service and other on-line services brought the total cost of the facility to $520 million.
Its business has been built on chat-rooms for teenagers, e-mail, craftily packaged information and an unremitting quest to make its on-line services friendly to even the most technophobic web neophyte.AOL, based in Virginia, says it intends to give Netscape lots of independence and to keep changes at the company's Silicon Valley base to a minimum.
