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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.
Alexa, Ok Google, App Stores, AMP and it's relationship with carousel widgets, etc.
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.
Its still big money to claim the homepage of most people over 60. Most to my knowledge still don't use smartphones - at least for email, which they do use - which they have a home PC for of some kind to open a browser and go to aol, msn (redirected to outlook), or yahoo.com.
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.
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.
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=33...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they buy you out to be laid off? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep that kind of talent?
Right, this seems dumb as you're going to lose your best people first, since they're the ones knowing they'll have no issues finding something else on the open job market.
There's a good Netscape documentary filmed during their last year leading up to the acquisition. When they were working to get the Mozilla source code released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
at 53:30 one of the engineers says " We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's gonna go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that. " Sounds pretty prescient considering current events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
There's lots of old-school people in that documentary. Brewster Kahle
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.
>Q: What's a portal? Alexa, Ok Google, App Stores, AMP and it's relationship with carousel widgets, etc.
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.
Good contemporary read: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/fear.html jwz was right, the source code was out there and even though AOL eventually gave up on browser tech, the code lived on to become Firefox, re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward, and providing an independent browser that's beholden to users first.
I fondly remember when the selling point of Firebird/Firefox was that it isn't a bloated, sluggish piece of crap unlike all other major browsers (including Netscape) at the time.
Back then, it was still possible to develop a web browser without hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. Fast forward to how the web platform has "progressed" and browsers are again sluggish, bloated pieces of crap, but now that horrible technology also powers far more applications. We've dug ourselves into a hole that we can't get out of anymore.