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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

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bsimpson·

Who poisoned Netscape?

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Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).

Is Collabora not a good product?

Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.

thanks, I couldn’t remember where I had heard it

AOL

Didn't AOL buy Netscape?

There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.

AOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.

You make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's

They were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.

By the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.

Netscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.

It's not that simple.

Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.

Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko

Microsoft was the overwhelming majority of all installations. So effectively, once Microsoft added it, it was a utility. I'm well aware of that history.

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