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Netscape.com Loses Its Identity
wh0pper writes "Digital Trends has a great opinion piece about how Netscape has lost its identity again in regards to their wanna-be Digg portal. One interesting fact I was not aware of is that Jason Calacanis is the person behind the new beta Netscape portal. A choice quote: 'If this business model sees the light-day and it looks like it will, Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears than real intellectual news.' I've tried using the new beta Netscape site, and personally hate it. The little link to the external site and the frame to keep you on Netscape's site are deal killers for me. Does the general audience think it can compete?"
Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini than real intellectual news.
I thought this sort of vapid interest was not delimited to certain generations.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
they're not bad. Misused frames are bad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The name "Netscape" now carries no special weight. AOL would be better off trying to leverage their existing proprietary features (AIM, user logins and stored information, etc.) to integrate some new features into the services they provide and bring them to new consumer markets.
Aha! So that's why Paris, Britney, and Jessica are featured so prominently.
Seriously. From the current netscape.com front page, at least a third of the content is of the form...
That's not a brand. It's a cheap rehash of Cosmo.
It is, however, unsurprising, considering the demographics of AOL's customer base.
What utter crap. You actually think that Windows users should still be paying third parties any time they want to connect to the net, browse the web, or stream video? The Bush administration has been a plague upon the country, but dropping the anti-trust wackiness against Microsoft was the right way to go. The anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft have not resulted in one ounce of good for the consumer. It was all a matter of key industry players trying to use the legal system to subvert the free market.
Let me get this straight: you want Microsoft punished for bundling sockets into Windows?
Of course you were probably the first in line to bash them for not including something so basic.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I don't understand why they would want to target an audience that they already have captured for the most part with AIM. A young audience's expendable income may have a larger percentage of expendability, but it's not like they make a lot of money.
math: 100% of $10 is less than 10% of $200
If they wanted to make a decent portal, they really should consider either making their audience choices a little larger or tergeting an audience with a better marketability. Sure kids will snap at ANY next best thing, but more mature consumers have the power to keep it going.
I don't think I'd call what Netscape has been "real intellectual news".
They might as well make it an MMORPG while they are at it. That probably would get more users than Netscape 8 at least
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
RealNetworks deserves to be out of it's misery like a sick, dying animal. It only exists so that they can continue tilting at windmills.
Trumpet needs to go away, if only to finally kill off the old dead versions of Windows. The one advantage of something that old is that apparently, nobody bothers to try and virus them anymore.
As for Netscape? Cool name, but that's about it. Time to send it out to pasture.
These companies did not deserve a better fate. They weren't fast enough, smart enough, mean enough or have deep enough pockets to be real contenders in the market.
The one good thing that came out of all of that mess was Mozilla.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
No company has the inherent right to be in business and to stay in business forever. Why do you bring the Bush administration into this at all? Hell, what does any administration have to do with any of this? This is capitalism, no more, no less. Protecting companies like Trumpet and Real by prohibiting other companies from entering those markets is simply absurd. TCP/IP is a standard. Nobody owns it and nobody has exclusive rights to it. Trumpet offered an implementation of it. And so did Microsoft. How is Microsoft in the wrong? RealNetworks is barely relevant anymore mainly because their protocol sucks. The only reason they were relevant in the first place is because they were one of the first companies to offer streaming media. There are better protocols now. Again, how is this microsoft's fault?
These companies didn't deserve anything. Companies come and go as markets change. Protecting these companies will only stifle innovation and competition.
For the record, I'm not a Microsoft supporter. I don't care for their software and I don't use any of it. However, I do not feel the need to bash them with bullshit economics like you apparently do. Stop that.
If it weren't for Microsoft, we'd be paying for a copy of Netscape 6.87 based on the Netscape 4.x codebase instead of running Firefox. Thank you, Bill Gates.
It is pretty shortsighted of you to think that there could not possibly have been another decent, free web browser.
Frankly, the Netscape name brand is probably not a good choice for this. I've never understood why the Netscape website has always been stretched so far beyond its original use. Netscape was a browser, not a portal, and as much as you try to make it otherwise, Netscape.com still just a place to get an alternative browser (it's just harder to find the link nowdays).
I doubt they would do it, but with a bit of cleanup it could be a decent site.
Just remove all images from the right side of the screen, kill the ads in the
middle of the frame, and finally remove the junk at the bottom of the page
(nobody's gonna look there anyways so might as well save bandwidth).
As it is, the site is too busy and it is hard to focus on the stories. Story
selection seems weird - it is just news. Nothing to provoke a serious
discussion. The commenting link is very small, as if the designers were
afraid someone might actually post a comment.
I also don't get their voting system. It'd be one thing for me to rate the
story on a scale, say from 1 to 10 and then post the average rating next to
the story. That way user input has some meaning. But what does it mean that
10 people voted for a story? Ten out of how many? How is that related to the
quality of the post?
Bottom line: it is not crazy for AOL to run a community discussion website -
forums were their core business for a while. But this website shows that that
they have surprisingly little clue about their core business.
The success or failure of the Netscape brand no longer matters to AOL. They know they'll never see Netscape bring back the billions of dollars AOL spent on it - not that making money was ever the point of buying Netscape anyway. AOL now uses Netscape to play with differnt or new ideas without watering down the AOL brand. In a year Netscape.com will be something else, and the lessons learned from giving users control over content at Netscape.com will be applied to hundreds, if not thousands of other projects in the AOL/TW universe.
you are aware that Google uses frames when you're viewing a Google Translate page or a Google Cache page, right?
[move
I look at this latest development, following so many other baffling ones, and feel a dull ache. Once I was happy - even eager - to send bucks toward Jim, Marc and Jim. How depressing to think it would've been a mercy to retire the company name long before the conception of the beta's k3wl arcade labyrinth. It's like a mutated descendant of GEnie gone horribly wrong.
<grrr
That's called sane, normal use of frames - to split content over two websites. Using frames as a LAYOUT tool is a disasterous step in the wrong direction. Using frames to trap users is just plain evil.
OS/2!!
All of this talk about how Microsoft killed the internet is typical OSS/Mac/Commie fanboi rhetoric that picks on companies they don't like (like Microsoft) while ignoring companies that are supportive of their particular agenda (strange how IBM used to be the evil empire, but they embraced Linux, so they're "cool" now).
My first experience with the internet at home was on OS/2 Warp 3.0, which came with the wonderfully easy to set up Internet Access Kit. This included the Web Explorer browser, a TCP/IP stack and dialer, and (OMG how evil of them to bundle this a la MSN!) the IBM Global Connection client and a signup wizard for IBM's own ISP.
And OS/2 Warp 3.0 also came with a full suite of multimedia applications quite a bit more sophisticated than MPLAYER.EXE and SNDREC.EXE. How dare they bundle that in the O/S? They should make people download RealAudio Player and use that!
Here's the simple facts: Any O/S worth its salt was going to have to include a TCP/IP stack as the internet became popular. Same thing with a web browser. After all, what on earth do you do once you're connected to the internet? At the very least you need an FTP client to fetch other software, but a web browser makes that much easier. Heck, IBM Web Explorer was atrocious! I typically used it to download Netscape or IE for Windows 3.1 and used that instead and never touched WebEx again! Same thing when Windows 95 started to include IE. IE 2.0 was utterly unusable. And 3.0 wasn't much better. But it was a way to easily go to www.netscape.com to download the latest version of Netscape.
What really did Netscape in was that IE 4.0 was actually quite usable and feature-rich. Microsoft simply delivered a better product. Netscape decided to offer a bloated suite with their 4.0 release. Remember Communicator? With IE you had a browser and you had the option to use MS's lame Internet Mail and News, or you could get something decent like Eudora or Pegasus Mail. But with Netscape Communicator, you had this massive, crash-prone application that threw everything but the kitchen sink. And it took an eternity to download because it was so large. Eventually, they started offering a 4.x version of Navigator, but not at first, and it often lagged behind the Communicator version, so you were stuck with bugs and incompatibilities that were fixed in the newer versions.
So get this straight... Netscape killed Netscape, not Microsoft. Microsoft simply offered a better product. With the advent of IE 4.0, there was no longer any reason to download Netscape because Netscape was the inferior product by that time. This is totally fair. It's called competition. So what if Microsoft bundled it with the O/S? As I said, you need something to be able to, at the very least, go get something better. Why would Microsoft settle for having such a cruddy and almost unusable browser as IE 2.0 was? Of course they improved it and made it fully functional. (I think the KDE developers realized this, too. In the internet age, you need a web browser in your desktop. Hence Konqueror. And while the first versions of Konqueror weren't quite up to the task of using it as your default browser, they too saw a need to improve it and today it is quite adequate as one's default WWW browser.) You all bash MS constantly for making bug-ridden crapware, but then when they actually make great improvements to IE, you then bash them because it's finally better than your beloved Netscape and pretty much puts Netscape out of business? Gee, shame on Microsoft for developing and improving their software. And this wasn't even just on Windows. I ran Mac OS 8 for a long time, and Netscape would be guaranteed to crash my computer- it was just a matter of time until it happened. If I ever had to use someone else's Mac and all I saw wa
Tell that to Mozilla, which made $72MM from Google.
What law did they break, please inform me?
OMG, they bundled a web browser with their operating system (and back in my Windows days I *still* used Netscape instead, because of *choice*), just what Apple and several Linux distributors do, not to mention mobile operating systems. Same goes for media player (who the hell would EVER use WMP? it skips; it sometimes even plays videos on half or double speed! in short, it's completely broken for regular viewing).
OMG, they have a huge market share. I'm dying of fear. I was able to choose Netscape, I was able to choose Linux, and now a Mac. I don't see where there is *any* problem, nor what law MS allegedly broke.
Microsoft broke the law with regards to how a monopoly is allowed to use its market dominance to break into other markets.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
M$ owes Trumpet a lot; the reason everybody bought Win 3.1 machines for the Internet was because of Trumpet. Plus, their winsock was better than Microsoft's: easier to use, more flexible.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore