+1 on the marketing but they never stopped printing the phone book, still have them....
I worked for the EU at the time as a contractor on technology take up. The old 'Post Office' mentality of 'you'll get (technology/equipment) when I say so' caused Europe to be years behind in what subsequently became the Internet.
The Internet standard (TCP/IP) was implemented in US by DARPA in the late 70s but the PTTs, as they were known, insisted on the X series standards being implemented in Europe.
Add to that the politics of character sets between the Europeans, how to deal with accents and umlauts, and we slipped further back.