-----Original Message----- From: WinInfo UPDATE [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 17 July 2003 5:11 To: Grant Bush Subject: WinInfo Daily UPDATE--July 16, 2003
AOL Effectively Kills Netscape, Frees Mozilla AOL announced yesterday that it will reorganize the Mozilla project, which until now has worked on developing the Netscape Web browser. AOL will lay off 50 Netscape developers and transform the project into a nonprofit organization, signaling an end to Netscape and its competition with the dominant Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) browser. AOL was quick to downplay the news, noting that the 50 employees are less than 10 percent of Netscape's employees and that AOL will continue to support current Netscape users and the Netscape Web portal. But AOL's related announcement that future development of the Mozilla browser suite will move to a new, independent foundation signifies that the company has clearly given up on the browser market. AOL purchased Netscape in November 1998 for a whopping (and now obviously ludicrous) $4.2 billion, but the actual purchase price was closer to $9 billion, thanks to stock-price inflation during the Internet bubble. The returns on AOL's investment have been less than fruitful for the company, which eventually surrendered control of the browser market to IE and saw its share of the Web portal market fall to companies such as MSN, Yahoo!, and the Google search engine. Last month, AOL signed a 7-year contract with Microsoft that will let AOL use IE as the underlying technology in its market-leading online software, ending speculation that the company would move its browser product to the Mozilla technology on which the Netscape browser is based. AOL said it made the decision because IE is superior to Mozilla, an interesting decision considering recent end-user frustration with Microsoft's now-glacial IE development time. The Netscape developers and group of open-source volunteers who formed the Mozilla.org project squandered any momentum they might have gained from opening up the Mozilla source code, taking more than 5 years to bring Mozilla-related products to market. Now, AOL is transforming Mozilla.org into a nonprofit organization called the Mozilla Foundation. The foundation will oversee development of the Mozilla browser suite, which consists of a Web browser (code-named Mozilla Firebird), email and Usenet news clients (code-named Mozilla Thunderbird), and calendar, chat, and HTML editor applications. In addition, hundreds of add-ons and accessory applications for various purposes are in the works. AOL will donate $2 million to the foundation and give it all the Mozilla trademarks and logos. But despite constant improvements, Mozilla products barely register on Web browser market-share surveys. Recently, Apple Computer decided to use a different browser technology for its popular (and arguably superior) Safari product. Mozilla.org was further embarrassed when it attempted to wrest the Firebird name and trademark away from an open-source database project that had used the name for years; despite claims by numerous Mozilla.org coders that they owned the name, the organization later quietly backed off and instead began to refer to its browser as Mozilla Firebird.
Copyright 2003, Penton Media, Inc.
