A moment of silence for ol' Netscape... — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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A moment of silence for ol' Netscape...

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I'd say Netscape's demise has very little to do with AOL buying them and very much to do with bad management prior to that but after the acquisition of Collabra (jwz has a whole lot to say about that...) and inability to understand how the web worked, failure to understand who actually used the browser for which reasons and which way they used it, and also with how the web would come to work later. The story of Netscape is kinda similar to how Ericsson thought cell phones were only for the busy businessmen - not for the average individual for personal use - and got run over by Nokia because they were marketing and designing to the wrong segment of users, despite a huge initial technology lead. Ericsson eventually had to band together with Sony just to get out of the rut of yuppie electronics and into consumer electronics. Originally Mosaic/Netscape was about dedicated people making a better browser than anybody had seen before. But after a few releases, Netscape the company was aiming at the corporate market, in groupware, and relied on sales of their products, servers and browser. Microsoft beat them at making actually working groupware and also beat them in not relying on sales of the browser product, which was a gigantic portion of the Netscape business. If Netscape had been more flexible and realised that users are the single most important factor for a web company on either side of the server-client divide, they could have managed. What Netscape really would have needed is a company like Google to come rescue them by freeing their source of income from being sales of a product competing with another product that was free of charge and bundled, but Google wasn't there yet. AOL bought a ship that already had massive holes in the hull... they desperately poured money into Netscape trying to save it, which is a large part of why Mozilla is a viable alternative today, but they weren't interested in Netscape for the browser, and never had any larger interest in designing for non-customer users. Which is all a modern browsers is about, really. Users. All web developers should be glad for AOL buying Netscape. It's what paid the salary for all those developers of a brand new and rather buggy rendering engine for the five years it took between nc4 and nn7. Without AOL funding, mozilla.org would most likely have died when Netscape killed project Grommit (nn5) in favour of project Raptor (nn6), powered by Gecko. .. and yes, I'm an optimist :) -- var Liorean = { abode: "[sigrotate][url]http://liorean.web-graphics.com/[/url]\|[url]http://codingforums.com/[/url]\|[url]http://web-graphics.com/[/url][/sigrotate]", profile: "[url]http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798[/url]"}; Loading...
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