With word processing, if you were currently using a typewriter, and correcting tape/fluid, and editing, and re-typing pages (and, hey, change your mind about the name of the protagonist in your novel? one command)... that seems a very easy sell.

Spreadsheets also seemed an easy sell from the start (e.g., accurate instant calculations of, say, current paper ledgers, without a calculator). Even before people understood all the new things they'd be doing with spreadsheets that weren't practical or convenient before.

("Education", "balancing your checkbook", "organizing your recipes", and other early pitches for non-business ordinary people home computers... not so much. Though a lot of ordinary people tried programming.)

One distinction with the Web might've been that (at least initially) although it might've made ordinary people want to use a computer, they didn't immediately see what it was good for. Initially, you could wander around Yahoo, and click to some Web museum experiment, and that was a novelty and a nice demo you could extrapolate, especially if you were an ordinary person into science fiction or futurism. But mostly you knew a bunch of companies were suddenly throwing money at it, and that those companies also didn't seem to know what it was good for. But lots of people wanted to be there.