Comment by petcat
3 hours ago
> Netscape has seen its browser share go from about 80% to about 20% during this time, all the while it could do nothing to address competitive concerns, because their key software product was disassembled in 1000 pieces on the floor and was in no shape to drive anywhere. That single bad decision, more than anything else, was the nuclear bomb Netscape blew itself up with.
This post from spolsky is always amusing to me because it came 6 months after Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations to crush Netscape. So it's funny that he claims Netscape killed themselves, when the courts actually said that Microsoft killed Netscape. Obviously Netscape made critical bad decisions, but Microsoft's illegal behavior was what actually killed them.
I mean if Netscape had been in any kind of condition to defend itself maybe MS wouldn't have succeeded.
Netscape made mistakes, but they didn't lose 60% of their market share in just two years because they didn't ship a major update. They lost it because Microsoft bundled a "good enough" browser with their operating system already installed on the computers out of the box.
Well first off I remember Netscape of that time, it was a disaster, and this was the time when most peoples computer browser stuff was handled by their nerdy relative. I had plenty of people I could have put Netscape on their computers but I didn't because it was just such a shitshow.
So I'm not sure about that loss of market share being just due to MS. IE at the time was just better than Netscape. You had to be a masochist to use Netscape. It would crash badly at the silliest little things, and since websites were made with even less professional standards than nowadays those silly little things were quite frequent.
You might have gotten IE preinstalled, but even for devs who went and installed Netscape it just made more sense to use IE, because it was better.
MS preinstalled IE, but Netscape made sure only the truly dedicated would actually download and use it.
Without Netscape's mess-up I can totally see them only losing 30% of their share, and being in a good place to recuperate when MS got slapped down in court.