I was a little surprised that Boeing pulled the plug on their WiFi service, and even more surprised at the amount of money that they invested in it (R&D etc.). I can't understand why it cost so much, moreover, I would agree that the market would not justify that kind of investment. There is, however, a market for the right service that is priced appropriately.

I first used this service a year and a half ago, on a Luftansa flight from Portland to Frankfurt, and was thrilled to have it available. I was able to send some last minute changes on a customer presentation, to my team in Europe so that it would be available in back-up media, as well as integrated into a sales presentation and ready for the meeting when I landed. I also had the opportunity to address some urgent emails, that required changes to attachments, that I would not have been able to address with my Blackberry, when I arrived.

I don't know about you, but on long flights, I have found that most of the business travelers spend some portion of their time working on PCs. Without internet connectivity, that time is less and less useful, especially as Web 2.0 applications become more dominant.

I found 3 issues with the service, that caused me to curtail my use.
1) I found it expensive. Ten dollars was ok for emergency use, but the full flight fee was too expensive for casual use
2) I had a bad first experience. My battery died before my hour was up, and I couldn't get help from the airline staff. As a result they sent me a bill for over $80 (according to their records I was connected for over 8 hours). It took me forever to be reimbursed, and no one that I talked to could understand the logic that I shouldn't be charged more than the rate for the entire flight = ~$27.
3) With no power to the seats my battery was only good for a little over an hour of heavy use. The MicroSoft guy in the seat beside me, was emailing and 'IMing' the entire flight. He had this huge battery extension that gave him 16 hours of compute time. I was not going to purchase a beast like that for >$200 let alone carry it around with me, just to support emailing from an airplane!