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AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

money.cnn.com

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Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#21

Post by coralreef »

Scuds wrote: post #15

AOL, an industry behemoth with 14 million subscribers, will acquire Netscape's Navigator and Communicator software, its e-commerce software, and its Netcenter Internet "portal" site, one of the 10 most-visited sites on the Internet. The portal was supposed to be the real cash cow, here. Buying eyeballs in the early era of internet ads. Q: What's a portal? A: Yes, exactly.

They did have an advertising cash cow, just not as a web page.

Searching via a form directly embedded in the browser UI would end up being hugely valuable.

Google pays Apple ~$9 billion this year to remain the default search engine on Apple products.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#24

Post by asadotzler »

coralreef wrote: post #21
Scuds wrote: post #15

AOL, an industry behemoth with 14 million subscribers, will acquire Netscape's Navigator and Communicator software, its e-commerce software, and its Netcenter Internet "portal" site, one of the 10 most-visited sites on the Internet. The portal was supposed to be the real cash cow, here. Buying eyeballs in the early era of internet ads. Q: What's a portal? A: Yes, exactly.

They did have an advertising cash cow, just not as a web page. Searching via a form directly embedded in the browser UI would end up being hugely valuable. Google pays Apple ~$9 billion this year to remain the default search engine on Apple products.

AOL didn't know it. Browser search deals didn't exist until after AOL shut down Netscape in 2003. The first browser search deals arrived in 2004.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#25

Post by fallous »

IntelMiner wrote: post #13
fallous wrote: post #5

I was at Netscape at the time of the acquisition. When they offered buy-outs for employees that would volunteer for layoffs I gleefully waved my hand and left.

Why would they buy you out to be laid off? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep that kind of talent?

At the time AOL was planning to shut down the Silicon Valley site and preferred to have everything in Virginia. Additionally they were already in talks with Time Warner (which internally we knew about).

There was a lot of redundancy in ops between AOL and Netscape, and AOL's talks with Time Warner made it apparent that their belief was that content and subscriber base was their future, not software... which is where I was at the time.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#26

Post by jrnichols »

ransom1538 wrote: post #8

I worked with a guy that was at AOL during the sale to TimeWarner. Apparently, in a large layoff round, they gave everyone a check for 6 months of salary and everyone went to a bar. The party was legendary. Lay-off + cash + lots of alcohol = cops + fights + tears.

I was at Netscape in Mountain View during that time, and i don't remember anyone getting a check that big at all. The severance checks weren't small, but nowhere near 6 months.

I did not get laid off (was part of Netcenter ops) but other friends did. A few months before the layoffs, they were all reorganized into one group too.

They had 2 meetings - morning meeting? laid off. Afternoon meeting? still employed. People were paged to one of the two meetings. A friend i was staying with was paged to the morning meeting, but thought "Eh, i'll just sleep in and go with you to the later one." Cue a bunch of pages and phone calls saying "you need to be in the morning meeting" and we just knew that things were not going to go well at all.

I ended up leaving that job shortly after, and honestly, I regret leaving to this day. I thought that we were all fixing to get re-org'd again or laid off a few months later, but i could have stayed there for a few more years easily. Sigh. Hindsight is 20/20, they say.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#27

Post by jrnichols »

empath75 wrote: post #22

Aol (now oath) in Ashburn still has a Mozilla statue in the front hallway — it’s a Pokémon Go gym, for some reason, even though only Aol employees can get close enough to it.

I have two pairs of boxer shorts that came from the Netscape company store. They are still in great shape (i don't actually wear them..) that have the Netscape logo and Mozilla the character on them.

I wish I didn't actually wear (and wear out) my Netscape Communicator t-shirts. And I'm also kicking myself for not buying a bunch of other logo items!

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#28

Post by coralreef »

asadotzler wrote: post #24
coralreef wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did have an advertising cash cow, just not as a web page. Searching via a form directly embedded in the browser UI would end up being hugely valuable. Google pays Apple ~$9 billion this year to remain the default search engine on Apple products.

AOL didn't know it. Browser search deals didn't exist until after AOL shut down Netscape in 2003. The first browser search deals arrived in 2004.

That's right, Google was gaining popularity fast but few knew about the profit monster that targetted search advertising was. They IPO'd in 2004.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#29

Post by rossdavidh »

It should be said, despite the massive stupidity of how AOL handled what they bought, that their primary motivation might have been to use it as a bargaining chip with Microsoft: "play nice, or we'll make Netscape the default browser for AOL". At the time, that would have made IE a minority browser again, IIRC.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#30

Post by carlivar »

coralreef wrote: post #28
asadotzler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL didn't know it. Browser search deals didn't exist until after AOL shut down Netscape in 2003. The first browser search deals arrived in 2004.

That's right, Google was gaining popularity fast but few knew about the profit monster that targetted search advertising was. They IPO'd in 2004.

AOL was Goto's biggest customer. Later renamed Overture Services. That was well before 2004.

Goto/Overture owned the patent on search advertising, which Google eventually settled legal proceedings regarding. And this is how Yahoo, when they bought Overture, got a bunch of Google stock if memory serves.

Anyway here is the AOL search advertising deal, or one of them. 2000 and they certainly knew of it before that:

https://www.ectnews.com/story/4194.html

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