While this arrangement certainly benefits Netscape, the stronger version of this complementary relationship occurs when applications are designed exclusively for Netscape's browser.
For instance, if Netscape were the only browser that featured a plug-in that allowed text on a user's screen to be read aloud to the user, those interested in that particular feature would be forced to use Netscape as their browser. Finally, numerous features accessed through Netscape can be thought of as complementary products. Chat rooms, internet telephony, guestbooks, stock portfolios, content providers, date matching, java appelets, and on-line commerce are just some of the services provided through the Netscape browser.
Again we see Netscape benefiting from positive feedback: the more people who use Netscape, the more services we see available for or through the browser, which leads to more users, and so forth. Success Netscape's initial domination of the browser market can be linked to several strategic decisions.
First, Netscape Navigator was the first widely distributed Web browser [4]. Instead, the majority of the company's browser sales have occurred either at retail or into the growing corporate segment of the market. The company's proficiency in traditional product distribution network should not be overlooked as a key factor of success. Second, the company's founder realized that the promise of future profits lay not necessarily with the browser but in the maturing Internet infrastructure and applications market.
With this in mind, the company leveraged its initial success by broadening its product line to include a full line of clients, servers, development tools, and commercial applications. Third, Netscape has actively pursued a strategy of "coopetition". Netscape publishes its standards openly and has won many partners with its willingness to share the market and profits. The result of this "coopetition" has been the interoperability and portibility of the Netscape browser.
Gradually, the Netscape browser has become a key intranet component for many IT managers [8]. Netscape's brand name is strong, it has a large installed client base, and the company's enterprise software and Web site continue to provide a decent revenue stream [9].
With the new strategy to make its browser free for anyone to distribute or enhance, there is still a chance for the Netscape browser to become the spanning layer over all major operation systems on all platforms. Competition Netscape's most formidable competitor is Microsoft's Internet Explorer which today integrates its own operating system with the browser [10]. Microsoft's interest in the browser market can be traced to when the company first talked to Netscape about licensing its browser technology.
Netscape declined, feeling that Microsoft's offer was undervalued and in addition would provide the company with access to virtually all of Netscape's technology. A year later, Microsoft introduced its own browser. The battle between Netscape and Microsoft to dominate the browser market has been an interesting one.
Earlier this year Netscape proposed that dominating this space hinged on providing customers with enhanced features. When sales of Netscape Communicator -- which includes e-mail, group discussion, and conferencing features -- proved disappointing, Netscape once again began pushing a stand-alone version of its browser [11].
So just how important is market share in this market? On the one hand, Netscape CEO James Barksdale insists that the Internet business will not evolve in the same way as the operating system business. These include advertising and electronic-commerce revenues from its popular Web site and sales of Internet software used on servers [14].
Microsoft certainly agrees with the latter point. Was Netscape ever bought out? Saurabh 23 Apr 1 Answer answer. Nishtha 07 May The company fundamentally failed to understand the new marketplace that the internet had created and instead went chasing after the traditional business market. The company was desperate to make money, and went after the only way they knew how. The product morphed from a web browser into an attempt to provide an all-in-one business communications tool.
Worse, the software was bloated and buggy. IE, with all its flaws, was ONLY trying to be a web browser and although it wasn't perfect, it was much better than what Netscape was offering. IE marched right on past Communicator.
Read More. View all vote's. No Vote. No Up Vote. Netscape was shipping garbage, and shipping it late. The necessary decision to overhaul Netscape Communicator with a new, Mozilla-built rendering engine code-named Gecko , was smart but by then, too time-consuming. Now we had to rewrite the entire user interface from scratch before anyone could even browse the Web, or add a bookmark. During , Netscape sunk a huge amount of engineering effort into doing the 4.
This was a huge blow to the Mozilla project, since for the first half of the year, we weren't even getting full-time participation from Netscape. Zawinski nonetheless sees a silver lining to the failure and emphasized that the failure of Mozilla so far does not signal the failure of the open source development model.
Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. While Netscape may now only be a sweet, sweet memory to those who used it to first discover the web, the browser's monstrous impact has cemented it as one of the first and most important startups to shape the internet.
Netscape's founders successfully plucked a brilliant idea from academia and pushed it onto the world's stage at a time when competition didn't exist, websites were not much more than plain-text blurbs and inline images were still revolutionary.
Consider the battle that would ensue between this web pioneer and Microsoft. The "browser wars," as they came to be known, would ultimately lead to creation of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's antitrust suit and the formation of the Mozilla Project and Firefox. Andreessen had spent some of his time at university working on the NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications Mosaic browser and understood full well the potential it offered.
The team then churned out the first point release in October of that year: Mosaic Netscape release 0. By the end of December, the company underwent a significant transformation, adopting the name Netscape Communications and launching Netscape Navigator 1. The company launched Netscape Navigator into the market without even a glimmer of real competition and the browser went on to become the de facto portal to the web in early Of course, Microsoft was working feverishly in the background to play catch-up with a browser of its own creation, licensing Mosaic's tech to build the first iteration of Internet Explorer.
It was around this time that Microsoft was preparing to release Windows 95 and a separate add-on pack: Windows 95 Plus! Pack, which included Internet Explorer 1.
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