Tuesday marked the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the greatest
investment boom in history. On August 9, 1995, Netscape issued its
initial public stock offering, which is widely regarded as the spark
that set off the stock boom of the late 90's and set the stage for
today's tech world.
A lot has happened since then. Fortunes were made, lost at the
mid-point and redistributed again through today's period of massive
Internet growth. Many of the largest players a decade ago have vanished
while others have survived and flourished.
Netscape is among the originals that survived, though often by
the skin of its teeth. In the summer of 1995, if you were one of
the growing numbers of people using the Internet, chances are you
were surfing on a Netscape browser. Netscape held an 80%+ market
share of the browser market but that changed very quickly in late
August 1995 when Microsoft released a version of Windows95 with
a bundled Internet Explorer.
In November 1998, AOL purchased Netscape for $4.3billion worth
of stock, which due to the rapid inflation of stock prices at the
time, was worth almost $9billion when the sale closed months later.
AOL would go onto purchase the Time Warner publishing empire in
January 2000 for approximately $160billion worth of stock transfers,
two months before the beginning of the tech-stock meltdown and two
months after Netscape released its disastrous 6.0 upgrade. Netscape
was suddenly in a very bad spot.
For several years, Netscape appeared to be neglected though it
provided the basic browser for AOL users. Many of today's non-AOL
users relate to it as a Google-fed information portal, more of a
search tool than a browser maker. In the background however, a team
working on the original Mozilla browser technology that Netscape
released in open-source format in 1998, developed the Firefox browser
that was being fostered by AOL. Working on the AOL payroll until
2003 when they were offered a $2million donation as polite severance,
the Mozilla Foundation released the highly popular FireFox in the
autumn of 2004. It quickly grew in popularity and is now considered
a common alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Netscape has had a long and storied corporate history surviving
as a brand name against the stiffest competition where literally
thousands of others failed. Ten years is a long time in an industry
that measures a generation in 18 - 24 month spans.
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