His wife complained that she didn't have that AOL screen when the Internet popped up. She wanted that look and feel, she didn't want Mozilla or IE as her browser, she wanted the AOL one. Why? Because she was used to it, and she didn't want to learn something new.

Microsoft has gotten away with this same piece of FUD. "I don't want to learn anything new." Well, besides the fact that that's pretty sad to begin with, AOL and MS have both changed their interfaces several times, and people keep learning them. Did your friend try setting the IE homepage to Yahoo? They have categories that match many of the AOL ones.

Oh, or did you mean she liked the specific channels that AOL has? She likes their choice of movie reviews. She likes their selection of travel options. That's AOL's market research doing it's job the exact right way. Find out what people want and give it to them.

AOL isn't really "easier". It's just more familiar. Whenever someone asks me how to do or find something on AOL, I have no idea. It takes me twice as long to do it that way as Googling for it.