In the months that followed, Netscape Navigator steadily lost market share to Internet Explorer. According to an America Online internal email, Gates asked an AOL executive in January 1996, “How much do we need to pay you to screw Netscape?” by designating Internet Explorer as AOL’s featured browser. Moreover, Microsoft had muscled its way into the commercial online market, and the largest service providers-including America Online, CompuServe, and AT&T Worldnet-replaced Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer as their preferred browsing software.
Netscape 60 download for mac install#
What’s more, computer users, especially new users, had little incentive to download and install Navigator on the Windows platform: Internet Explorer was already there, and technically it was just as good. The Netscape saga-from spectacular rise to decline and humiliating absorption by AOL-spanned fewer than five years. Reid wrote in Architects of the Web, “put the Internet indelibly on the map with millions of people who hadn’t been there yet.” It had taken Netscape “about a minute.” The IPO, as Robert H. The Wall Street Journal observed that it had taken General Dynamics 43 years to become a corporation worth $2.7 billion in the stock market. Clark’s stake in Netscape was worth more than half a billion dollars Andreessen’s was worth more than $58 million. The IPO demonstrated that the Web could be a place to make fortunes fast. It was a smashing debut by any measure-“the best opening day for a stock in Wall Street history for an issue of its size,” the New York Times said. It climbed as high as $74.75 a share before settling at day’s end to $58.25. The shares went up for sale August 9 on the Nasdaq exchange. The IPO, underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Hambrecht & Quist, included 5 million shares of Netscape, priced at $28 per share. It had taken General Dynamics 43 years to be worth $2.7 billion in the stock market. But according to detailed notes that Andreessen took at the meeting, Microsoft’s representatives came on strong and proposed that the companies carve up the browser market-with Netscape Navigator confined to the older, less lucrative versions of Windows. In the run-up to the meeting, Netscape and Microsoft had tentatively explored a strategic relationship. The smoldering hostility between the companies turned acute on June 21, 1995, at a four-hour meeting at Netscape’s headquarters.
Andreessen-who sometimes during the mid–1990s was called the “next Bill Gates”-supposedly boasted that Netscape would reduce Windows to a mundane set of poorly debugged device drivers.
Netscape 60 download for mac software#
And the browser’s potential as a platform for software applications represented an undeniable threat to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. But as Netscape’s browser demonstrated, the Web was becoming the information superhighway. He mistakenly thought the Internet was just a precursor to some sort of elaborate, multidimensional information superhighway.
Gates had been slow to recognize the potential of the Internet and the Web.
0 kommentar(er)
