Online giant AOL, which acquired Netscape Communications in 1999, announced it will no longer support the Netscape Navigator – having left both the brand and the browser to wither so long it was beyond revival.
In a short tumultuous life, Netscape rose from obscurity to become a house hold name and the darling of the share markets, before attracting an inevitable corporate suitor in AOL, which abandoned the still immature Navigator.
It was just 13 years old.
The Netscape story is a cautionary tale. It began at the University of Illinois where student programmer Marc Andreessen developed the Mosaic browser, the web pioneer.
Andreesen then co-founded Netscape Communications and the first version of the Netscape browser went live in 1994.
In 1995, Netscape listed on the NASDAQ exchange, announcing to the world the internet had arrived – and you’d better get on board fast. It was listed at US$7 and closed the first day’s trading at US$29, making it the biggest IPO in history – and even 13 years later
The rest is history. Microsoft licenced Mosaic source code from Spyglass (after freaking out), a Uni of Illinois commercialisation unit and constructed the Internet Explorer – which it then used to belt the hell out of Netscape marketshare.
When Microsoft bundled IE with Windows 95 as a free browser, it was all over bar the lawsuits. The move led to the unprecedented and ongoing antitrust actions against Microsoft. But it was the beginning of the end for Netscape, which was eventually sold to AOL for more than US$4 billion in 1999.
One good thing came out of the AOL years, and it is not small. At the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product – the Netscape Communicator web suite – into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla.
That open source effort has delivered Firefox.
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