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AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders
xcable points out a CNET story which begins "America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team," and offers a reminder that "AOL recently made a deal with Microsoft to use IE in future AOL releases." This adds a bit more detail to yesterday's (updated) story about the establishment of the Mozilla foundation.
If Mozilla surpasses IE in the next couple years, do you think AOL will try to bail on Microsoft? This could get interesting. The litigation is over for now so the browser wars must begin again... as if they ever ended.
What the hell are all those guys doing there?
All the best,
--Bob
The Register have an interesting take on this too here
We have to complete our assimilation of the Alpha quadrant.
Wrong. MS does not support alpha chips anymore. Hey, even Compaq/HP does not support them anymore!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
slow poison to Mozilla
;-)
Not at all. Mozilla will continue, overseen by the new Mozilla Foundation.
And if a gift of $2M is "slow poison", then perhaps we should get them really annoyed - they might shower us with even more money.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
$2e6/50 = $20,000/yr
And, if that 50 was only 10% of the Netscape workforce, and we split that $2 mil over 500 users, that's a Christmas bonus, not a salary.
So, $1 mil/yr for the Moz Foundation is chump change. An earlier statement that "5 coders is plenty for Mozilla" seems kind of silly to me. I wonder how big the IE team is.
Thanks for the good time, honey, I'll call you. Here, buy yourself something nice.
Now we get to see how Moz survives as a *real* open-source project (i.e., w/out funding). At least it's got a good code base (right?).
John.
Hey! Without my job at Netscape, I would never have the free time to post this comment!
/syle
So Microsoft has more than enough cash on hand to buy out AOL/TW.
If the marketplace were completely free and unfettered, you'd think that Microsoft would, rather than pour money down the hole that has been MSN, simply buy out AOL with its 30 million subscribers.
But Microsoft won't do this because they know they can't; that the DoJ would immediately ask questions about unfair market consolidation were such a buyout offer made.
So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN.
As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action, and no inconvenient questions will be raised except by AOL management and stockholders.
Since MS can rely upon a steady revenue stream from Windows and Office to subsidize its efforts into taking over new markets they enjoy an advantage that AOL and other competitors simply don't have.
People buy Windows and Office like they're a standard, a necessity, that's no more avoidable than paying gasoline taxes.
Yes, Microsoft has the enviable position of just collecting taxes - like a government. And competing against the government is a no-win situation.
It is a foregone conclusion that AOL will lose. They will wither to nothing, or simply to a marginally-sized pet, like Apple, who would have died long ago if Microsoft had decided to not release Office for Mac.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
AOL kept them around long enough to extract that $750M from Microsoft without having to waste time and money pursuing the antitrust complaint.
Microsoft paid what is pocket change to them to deliver the final blow to the stake in the heart of what was once their biggest competitor in the browser arena. AOL/TW got badly needed cash, Microsoft got another seven years of IE dominance amongst the mouth-breathing internet user set. Web pages will continue to be designed so they'll look good for AOL retards instead of being designed to comply with established standards so they look good in all standards-compliant browsers.
As usual, Microsoft wins, the other party to the agreement thinks they won but will later realize they didn't, and the internet-using public loses.
Failed in the sense that it never dug Netscape, as a browser and company, out of the hole. But I'm sure glad to see that Mozilla rose out of all that effort.
As to what they were doing, you should check out ex-mozilla, a list of all the ex-employees that have accumulated over the past --- decade? --- and a little description each wrote up of what they did and what they're now doing. Bittersweet.
www.firastudios.com
Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
That's a little more harshly stated than I think the reality is. What survey has shown that 9 out of 10 people don't want Netscape/Mozilla? And if that survey exists, did people get to try the advanced features that these browsers have that IE lacks?
I think it's more an issue of 9 out of 10 people don't know there's a better browser out there, so they use what comes with their computer.
Bob Slydell: The Netscape developers.
Bill Lumbergh: Who're they?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guys, mumble a lot.
Bill Lumbergh: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of them being current employees here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that they were laid off five years ago and no one ever told them, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, they still get paychecks.
Bob Slydell: So we just went a ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Great.
Dom Portwood: So um, the Netscape developers have been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So they won't be receiving paychecks anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.
--- What
AOL has announced that it will use IE for the browser for seven years. Microsoft has announced that there will no longer be a standalone version of IE. So, if AOL is to still work on existing Windows boxes, then it must remain at IE6. But, it's hard to beleive that they won't want to move to the latest and greatest (tongue in cheek) IE when it ships, but that would force AOL to either maintain separate code bases or drop support for current versions of Windows. If they choose the separate code bases, then using the least common denominator approach, AOL won't be able to include future web features, because they don't exist in IE6. Dropping support for older versions of Windows, is a very calculated risk. There are two possible outcomes. Facing a forced upgrade, either AOL's would switch to a different ISP or shell out the bucks for a new version of Windows (and possibly new hardware). My bet would be to switch ISPs, but I'm sure AOL and MS are counting on people buying a new version of Windows, instead. If they are right, that's not a bad investment for MS $750M to get AOL users to all buy a copy of the next version of Windows. At 35 million AOL subscribers and a $100 upgrade cost, MS stands to gross $3.5 billion dollars. Not a bad return on investment.
The problem with Joe Average User trying to use any browser other than IE is that there are too many websites out there that ONLY work on IE. They don't use web standars, they use IE-specific code. Try to view those pages on Mozilla (or nearly any other browser that is standards-based,) and they simply don't work. It's a chicken-egg problem: those sites won't change, because 90% of users use IE. Users won't change, becuase many sites won't work outside IE. I had always hoped that if AOL switched to Mozilla, it would FORCE those websites to change, because of the number of users AOL has. Unfortunetly, it doesn't look like it will happen.