Netscape launched a doomed portal in 1997 and relaunched in 1998 after they started losing significant browser share to IE. There were already plenty of better portals at the time (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, etc) and Netcenter's only real traffic came via Netscape Navigator users because it was the default home page.

I don't understand the comparison to Netscape either. When Netscape was in it's prime, Elph's founder was 5 years old.