it’s all about juxtaposition. or quoting out of context.
netscape and aol/time-warner, part two:
“Netscape is nowhere, since Netscape no longer exists. There is
no longer a company called Netscape. It ceased to exist in 1999, when
AOL bought it. The Netscape “brand” is still being used by
AOL/Time-Warner, but there is no “Netscape” any more. Just
AOL/Time-Warner and the many names under which it does business.
That’s important to remember, because whatever nostalgia you might
have for Netscape-the-company, it is no more.”
Netscape: Browsing Past Its Past
“AOL Time Warner is remaking its pioneering Netscape software business into an Internet media hub brimming with Time Warner artists and publications, aimed at office workers and Web purists not already using AOL services.
“The browser is a crown jewel. However, six months from now, you won’t consider Netscape to be a browser company,” said Jim Bankoff, Netscape’s president, referring to its early role in creating the first popular tool for surfing the Web.”
mefi is all over the the story with the usual platitudes. i could go on a rant, but it’s probably not worth it. the “browser wars” were over a long time ago, well before aol bought netscape. mozilla is not a browser. it’s an application platform. you don’t like that? think it’s too pie-in-the-sky? fine. use another browser. maybe even one built on the mozilla codebase. or not. in any case, the browser wars are over and there are bigger fish to fry:
“As we move from an Internet of hundreds of millions of computers to an Internet of tens of billions of things that embed computers, he urged us to think ahead to an Internet that consists of billions of things.
The Sun CTO pushed us to consider this future beyond web services and even beyond Jini. He reminded us that the Internet is bigger than the Web, and suggested we look for new applications that are different in the way that instant messaging was. “The most interesting clients,” Papadopoulis said, “are the ones you no longer control.””
although i happen to use mozilla, i’m not evangelizing for the power of open source as an end in-and-of-itself. the software world is more complicated than that. it’s big enough for open and closed. papadopoulis is right. he can make money and the most interesting clients are the ones you no longer control.