Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft’s damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.
The reason AOL didn’t know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft’s price of free, they had no real business model anymore.
That’s the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.
Eh, I was around in that time. Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0 and it was basically as bloated as Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t until PhoenixFirebird Firefox project that pulled out a browser (and they later pulled out the email client and other things from that monolith) that IE had real competition.
But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier? Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover and there really wasn’t a real answer for IE until Firefox. Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator was worse than IE if you didn’t want a browser that took more than 20 seconds to start up and use up all your memory just in case you might want to use an HTML editor.
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time it became the outdated garbage we know it as today, but before that it was Netscape that wasn’t improving their product with similar results.
With technology, people tend to do revisionist history by preferring the better story without regards to the actual quality of the tech. But the reality was IE was actually better than Netscape Communicator (says a lot about how bad Communicator was) just like VHS was actually better than Betamax. Just doesn’t make as good a story when it’s about people using a tech that was better instead of the story being about people using inferior tech because of shenanigans.
Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft’s damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.
The reason AOL didn’t know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft’s price of free, they had no real business model anymore.
That’s the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.
Eh, I was around in that time. Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0 and it was basically as bloated as Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox project that pulled out a browser (and they later pulled out the email client and other things from that monolith) that IE had real competition.But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier? Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover and there really wasn’t a real answer for IE until Firefox. Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator was worse than IE if you didn’t want a browser that took more than 20 seconds to start up and use up all your memory just in case you might want to use an HTML editor.
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time it became the outdated garbage we know it as today, but before that it was Netscape that wasn’t improving their product with similar results.
With technology, people tend to do revisionist history by preferring the better story without regards to the actual quality of the tech. But the reality was IE was actually better than Netscape Communicator (says a lot about how bad Communicator was) just like VHS was actually better than Betamax. Just doesn’t make as good a story when it’s about people using a tech that was better instead of the story being about people using inferior tech because of shenanigans.