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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?"
As far as I can tell, AOL has never been entirely sure what to do with the Netscape brand name.
They seem to have bought the company mainly to use the browser as a bargaining chip against Microsoft ("We'll switch to Mozilla if you don't give us a good deal!"). Since they secured the new deal for the IE engine and jettisoned the browser development staff they've abandoned Netscape-the-browser at least twice, both times changing their minds. There was the surprise release of (IIRC) Netscape 7.2, which as near as I can tell involved merging the latest Mozilla Suite with their local tree, and then there was the outsourced chimera of Netscape 8.
They aren't interested in Netscape the browser, but they have this brand name that they don't want to waste, and they keep trying to come up with something to do with it. They tried it as a classic portal, they tried it as a low-cost dialup service, they tried it as a webmail service, they tried it as a toolbar, now they're chasing another trend, trying to jam the square peg into yet another shaped hole.
It makes about as much sense as it would make for, say, Coca-Cola to buy Dr. Pepper, then retire the soft drink flavor and start marketing Dr. Pepper spice racks.
(Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)
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.
Netscape used to be the domanant web browser... back when we were using Windows 3.1, you needed a third-party DLL called Trumpet Winsock to implement TCP/IP, and RealAudio was the dominant streaming program.
Then, Microsoft came to the party and knocked out the entire industry by illegally bundling competitors to all three of these pre-.com-era startups. Where are these players now?
RealNetworks still exists, but their proprietary audio/video codecs are used by nobody other than their bloatware RealOne product. Rhapsody is an also-ran in the digital music world.
Trumpet? They're still supporting networking for 3.1, 95, 98, and NT, but they've never had another must-have hit the size Trumpet Winsock and likely never will again.
And Netscape? They've officially deemed that there's no money to be made making a browser, and gave what they had for source code over to the Open Source community still uses the basics in the form of Mozilla. Netscape.com is just a domain that Time Warner keeps reformating. They've tried it as a cut-rate ISP, but United Online's Netzero and Juno have that game covered? They've tried it as a portal site, but realized that was redundant to AOL.com. So now they're trying it as a Digg knockoff... let's see how long that one lasts.
In reality, these companies deserved a better fate. Too bad as soon as the Bush 1.01 administration came in, the Clinton Justice Department's case suddenly died. At least the EU is still trying to take a bite...
Here's the deal. Frames are baaaad. Mmmmmmkaaaay?
(end of post)
http://www.beta.netscape.com/
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.
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".
It will gain *some* traction. They're going to throw enough money behind it to get people checking it out. And of those who do, a small percent might actually use it. But they're not doing it better than their competitors. It's not really innovative. It's just a "me too" (a phrase I'll forever associate with AOL and its users) site.
Calacanis being behind it probably gives it less cred with me than if they'd hired away Cmdr. Taco or one of the Digg or Fark founders to do it. Calacanis is a suit in sheep's clothing, and nothing good comes of suits.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
FYI - the 'new' site is http://www.beta.netscape.com/
I agree about the frame. It's huge.
And the comments are about as high quality as Digg.
The first comment, in the first story (about hooters), is:
It's all about the Wii.
I think that sums it up.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
thats the reason AOL bought Netscape to get the people who were going to netscape.com AND those that were downloading and installing Netscape, so they could put those AOL links in there also. I remember years back some article on the web that AOL was getting info on what sites people browsed from Netscape 6. It was like spyware bundled inside the browser.
et tu, slashdot? ;)
I have the pleasure of working as the lead developer for the new netscape.com.
We've been in beta for approximately 31 hours. We haven't even taken over the domain yet (and won't for awhile). The response has been overwhelming. It's the most valuable feedback we could have ever asked for though (and frankly, we expected a lot of it...) The frame navigator and the pop up new windows for instance, are things that annoy folks to no end -- duh, right? Well internally, it's an odd 50/50 split -- they are both designed from the start to be user preferences, configurable for each person. We'll get there in time, right now we're focused on measuring reactions to features and design changes. I know the definition of "beta" has changed.. but.. uh... it's beta. ;)
Are we attempting to be a "digg killer?" Not at all. We're attempting to iterate on the concept of social news for a completely different demographic. We're trying to create an honest, fun, interesting portal. Did digg kill slashdot? It's faster and has more daily content, yet people come here for discussion -- Slashdot's strength. We may not be "there" yet, but again, this thing is a brand new project, about 4 months old, and has only been publically accessible for less than two days.
Thankfully, we all have pretty thick skin here. It's been enjoyable talking to folks and seeing what the concerns are. Hopefully we can evolve this thing into the great product we all have in mind. I do appreciate everyone who has taken the time to send us their thoughts by e-mail or blog post. We're actively reading them and responding as much as we can. Let us know what your concerns are, and we'll try to address them (where we can, that is.. we don't like tons of ads just like everyone else.. just the nature of our position right now)
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).
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.
in his gra....... err ...... cancel that...
Seriously and ironically, Marc Andreessen IS an investor in Digg
Everytime this thread pops up, I go to netscape.com and I guess I'm just missing it - I don't see anything that reminds me of digg. It still looks like Netscape to me. Way too much coverage for what it's worth. There has to be more interesting news than this (since it's been covered twice tod on slashdot).
www.wildpad.com
"to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears" who the fsck isnt interested in that? at any age?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I thought that went out with the 90s, at least as far as the reputable portals go. It's rare that I agree with any actions perpetrated by Fox News, but I see they have the sense to include a "frame-buster" script on their site (as I do on all of mine), so clicking on the Netscape link led to the site I was expecting to see, not Netscape's "hijacked" version.
Oh, and having linked sites pop up in new windows is annoying too.
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
I don't know Digg's policy on pulling stories, but I'm pretty sure Time Warner's is a little more strict. Will net neutrality articles get pulled (RoadRunner, Netscape dialup)? How about anti-DRM ones (warner pictures/music/cable, CNN/TBS/TNT/Adult Swim)? I really doubt they'll allow lots of stories that challenge the party line.
Yes, the Netscape portal in the state it's in today is pretty boring, but when it first debuted in 1999, it was years ahead of its time. The major competition was My Yahoo!, and My Netscape had two killer features: the ability to drag-and-drop modules (imagine that) and a way to let publishers add their content to My Netscape, using a new file format called RDF Site Summary.
Netscape was a visionary company. If Microsoft hadn't squished them, they would single-handedly control the Internet today. You still see some of their ideas manifested in a myriad of places - Mozilla, feeds, open-ended portals, and applications-in-the-browser (what some call Web 2.0).