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Has AOL Ruined Netscape?
Anonymous Coward sent it: a scathing, three-page ZDNet article that claims the AOL purchase has turned Netscape into a shadow of its former self, that morale there is low and employee turnover is high, and that the company is now mired in bureaucracy, caught between Sun and AOL managements. The article was so sad, I almost wanted to cry by the time I got to the end.
Second, Netscape's Unix-oriented tech culture started to hurt them when focus shifted towards usability features and cute UI flourishes in 1996. This was clear both on the browser side
and on the server side
I don't, however, fault them for their lousy tech support. I always found their server support group competent and responsive. It wasn't their fault that the product engineers would leave nasty bugs unfixed for release after release. That's why Apache's so compelling. And unless you had a special relationship with Microsoft, mediocre support like Netscape's was far above average.
AOL and Sun bought themselves a troubled company with a faltering product vision, and they knew it. That doesn't mean Mozilla's not great technology; it is. And it doesn't mean Netscape's server line isn't good. It is. That's why their mail, web, directory, cert and app servers are the basis for the iPlanet line. But both the client and server groups at Netscape were sorely lacking product architects with customer and market focus.
In this regard, the buyout offered Netscape a chance for redemption. If AOL can be made to care about Mozilla, their understanding of customer-focused (as opposed to geek-focused) usability can help it in ways XUL and XPFE as rallying slogans couldn't. And though Sun is still coming up to speed as a software vendor, they at least know how to listen to their customers in designing products in a way Netscape never did.
Having lived through all of what the author describes, this article simply distorts Netscape's past year of history in order to create a flashy, attention-grabbing story --- even if it's of questionable accuracy.
;) Yeah, it takes a few months to order a new computer, and we see an AOL logo at company meetings. So what? Personally, I think AOL is a great company to work for, whether perceived as "cool" or not.
;)
1. Attrition: Yes, people have burned out and left Netscape. But, you know what? New, enthusiastic employees of equal or greater caliber --- excited about the work that's being done at Netscape, and already trained from hacking on the Mozilla source code --- have come back to replace them in full force. The net effect is zero.
2. Netscape culture: Guess what? For most employees, the culture *hasn't* appreciably changed. Employees' dogs and children still have company badges, and we drink all the beer we want.
3. 5.0 Release Date: The author provides no evidence that the turnover has resulted in the one year delay in the Communicator 5 beta. Which is convenient --- because no cause and effect relationship exists between these two events. As many Mozillans have pointed out already in far more detail, the delay came about from a ground-up rearchitecting of the entire product. (And anyone who is bothered by this can go to http://www.mozilla.org and help ship a browser; whining here won't do jacksquat.)
4. Barry Schuler's comments: I attended that meeting. Barry **never** made these comments. He was, however, busily serving up a barbeque after the meeting, as Mr. Barksdale himself would have done. (Another AOL executive, in fact, did make these comments, but the journalist is, in my opinion grossly stripping the comments out of their intended context, which would have been obvious had he attended the meeting.)
Based exclusively on my personal experiences, it looks to me as if this journalist sought to write an article about a topic, and then wedged the facts to fit his original preconceptions. We ain't dead yet.
--- elig@prometheus-music.com's personal $.02.