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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)

#41

Post by vxNsr »

DINKDINK wrote: post #36
vxNsr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>one of the engineers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski There's lots of old-school people in that documentary. Brewster Kahle

I figured all these guys/girl are probably a big deal now but I don't know anything about SV culture or history.

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

#42

Post by drawkbox »

This was largely a patent buy, they later sold them to Microsoft for a billion in 2012 [1], which Facebook ended up buying 650 of the 800 they bought from AOL [2].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-buys-netscape-web-pa...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/facebook-will-bu...

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

#43

Post by Apocryphon »

TIME Magazine: Visions 21- June 19, 2000.

Will AOL Own Everything? America Online could do in the early 21st century what Microsoft did at the end of the 20th: control the flow of key technologies

by Lawrence Lessig

pg. 9-11: https://transition.fcc.gov/transaction/aol-tw/exparte/disney...

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

#44

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

shshhdhs wrote: post #9

In 1998, $1 was worth $1.53 (in 2018 dollars), so this transaction would feel like a $6.4B deal.

Yeah, but Netscape was purchased with AOL stock, which was wildly inflated at the time, so you could also argue it feels like a couple hundred mil deal given the eventual tanking of AOL stock.

That was the thing about a lot of the huge deals of the original dotcom bubble. Most of them were made at inflated prices with (inflated) stock of the purchaser, but it's not like anyone ever paid that much cash for the total amount of those shares. That's one reason when the bubble burst that while painful it wasn't devastating to the overall economy: most of the insane valuations were never fully "realized" in the first place, so when they fell back to earth it really didn't wipe out as much wealth as the headline numbers made it seem.

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

#45

Post by tzury »

And sold to Verizon by $4.1B later on...

If you want to see the entire history of AOL acquisitions look here [1].

As the list grew, there was a sense in the crowd that AOL is a cemetery for startups. That is, ,buying them in, and then shortly afterwards, they die.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

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

#46

Post by code_duck »

tyingq wrote: post #31
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.

>Q: What's a portal? Alexa, Ok Google, App Stores, AMP and it's relationship with carousel widgets, etc.

I thought the answer was ‘Facebook without any activity from friends’ or ‘twitter’

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

#47

Post by Ibethewalrus »

jrnichols wrote: post #27
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!

Tried Cafepress?

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

#49

Post by quonn »

zeroname wrote: post #40
asadotzler wrote: post #11

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.

> ...re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward 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"…

Back then, Gecko was already complex. Firefox streamlined the UI, dropping for instance the Email client and unnecessary widgets.

It can be done. Just the engine remains complex, but it‘s not that big a problem. If needed, we can add a new doctype, just like HTML5 that puts the browser into some sort of strict mode where features are dropped.

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

#50

Post by skrebbel »

fallous wrote: post #25
IntelMiner wrote: post #13

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?

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…

But then why did they buy Netscape?
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