On the demise of Netscape

So AOL has officially discontinued the Netscape name for their re-branded Mozilla browser. But Netscape of course has been dead for some time.

First of all, let's get something straight: the World Wide Web was not a new concept even when the first web browsers were created. It was a development of something called "gopher", which similarly allowed you to create hyperlinked text on wide-area networks. There were two big differences between "gopher" and the Web: "gopher" was text-only and could operate as a straight text session to a serial port as well as a telnet connection to an ARPANET port (this being before the Internet), and the Web was based around an SGML variant (HTML) which allowed extending the formatting language in a variety of ways not possible with the much simpler Gopher formatting language, which was similar to GNU Info in its makeup. But the Web wasn't innovation, it was simple extension of already-existing technology.

Anyhow, NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of Illinois, decided to create a graphical extension for the web and created the <img> tag and various other extensions to the original text-only HTML and a browser to view them, called Mosaic. A few months after the first release of Mosaic, after it was the most-downloaded application in the Internet's young history, a youngster by the name of Marc Andreesson who'd been involved in the browser development got the bright idea from former SGI CEO Jim Clark that a commercial version of Mosaic could be made. So he went over to the Silicon Valley, made the rounds of venture capitalists, found one willing to fund a company to do this, and formed Mosaic Communications.

UIUC was not amused. They pointed out that they had the trademark to Mosaic and had not licensed that trademark to Andreesson, and accused Andreeson of illegally copying their software when he hired the original Mosaic team away from NCSA. Lawsuits were filed. Lawsuits were settled. $3M headed UIUC's way, and Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications.

So anyhow, the new browser was an instant success and *the* standard for web browsers -- until Netscape 4.0, which was unstable, slow, bloated, and just an outright disaster. So what happened? Well, bad management happened. As Netscape grew, they had to get more money from VC's to continue their growth. The VC's insisted on their own familiar managers, people they knew. These people were not good managers. I've seen the VC's, for example, put a garbage company CEO in charge of a computer hardware manufacturer. This doesn't work. But those VC's knew the garbage company CEO and were more interested in having someone they knew in charge than someone unknown who knew his shit. I know the manager who was in charge of the Netscape 4 development. He was blatantly incompetent to manage that development, and both his prior and future experience is one of utter failure, a failure that was rewarded by the VC's making him VP of Engineering at another company after he managed to destroy Netscape.

So crony capitalism happened to Netscape. The VC’s killed Netscape the same way they’ve killed many other promising companies—by putting preferred cronies into positions of authority within those companies, rather than people who know what the fuck they’re doing. They’d rather have their familiar cronies in place than someone they don’t know, who might do something that they don’t like. So Netscape got bought up by AOL, which pretty much abandoned it after using it as leverage to get a better deal out of Microsoft for an AOL-branded Internet Explorer, and so it goes.

– Badtux the Hi-tech Penguin