Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape.
What other browsers of note were around in that period?
There was a number of browsers coming up at that time, and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early boom, as the most successful option that led to both Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.
Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source available, though not under an open source license) - there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g. AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with datatypes support)
Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding the text based ones, included:
* 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects, stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)
* 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga), Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)
* 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee); Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML, and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and images...)
* 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python; supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb (Mac)
* 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially); Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...; still updated as of two years ago...)
Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it not existed, sure, things would have looked different, but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started development before Netscape launched, and others were abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape. Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for many years.
There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I remember vividly the day the release with background image support spread across campus and every webpage looked garish for the next several years - but it was an advantage measured in months, and with competition heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started catching up.
A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At most things would have looked different, and maybe some things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess they left took years.
In late 1995, Netscape released a browser that provided investors a comprehensive proof-of-concept online platform that was billed as the operating system for the Internet and they were being offered an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
JavaScript and CSS didn’t matter. Investors were looking at SSL for eCommerce, Java applets, plugins, VRML, RealAudio, etc.
Netscape stood out because nobody else was selling a comprehensive online platform with a compelling and plausible vision.
The World Wide Web became something because a crap load of money was invested into developing browsers.
It wouldn’t have happened on its own to this degree and none of those browsers were on their way to becoming a household name.
IE was already out. Opera was around the corner. Netscape was already close to its peak market share.
Plenty of people were selling alternatives, plenty of developers had funding. A lot of money had started flowing into browsers before Netscape. Had Netscape not soaked up the funding it did, more of that would just have flowed elsewhere.
The argument is not that Netscape were irrelevant, but they were one - big, sure, - player among many racing to commercialise features that already existed before Netscape.
One can imagine a world without JavaScript...
You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of Netscape?
Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.
Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.
What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.
How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?
Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.
And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.
They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.
E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].
"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.
[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/
Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)
Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.
Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.
If they can run it with a small enough team, then freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and functions to the power users.
The ads let you know what services are not worth your time, or only worth consuming with sufficient adblocking.
They're really doing you a great service by advertising that you're the product.
Also, hope is not lost for ad-free capitalism. For the first time ever I'm actually paying for subscription services that don't have ads (yet). Mostly to do with search and AI.
And don't worry about Phase Two. Phase Three is when the profit will happen.
That's quite the reach. The actual information you got, is them not telling you publicly. Either because they can't, or don't want to.
I mean, I do sympathize with your frustration, tho. Every time I read this lobotomized "Rampart-AMA" PR shit, a few of my own brain cells commit suicide. It's insulting.
If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US.
One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates.
Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost.
In such environment, does the question of business model even matter ?
If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a dream, not have a way to generate money.
==
Back to Bluesky:
The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its own users.
"Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the same time are very active when it's about criticizing.
The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher spender because of the importance that vanity / self-promotion has in their life.
One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content, than on technology.
Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or who controls what (because no matter how, this can change in the future).
What is going to make or break the alternative social media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers (not journalists) start setting up their own instances, if companies put up support accounts on their own domain, if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on their own sites to try to their push their own brand... then I'll start believing that we have a chance.
I understand your arguments about the technology, they are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of niche users, which are extremely demanding and very difficult to convert to paying users.
Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh content.
Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech, in order to secure a stronger business-model (and eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open ecosystem).
Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk back to the tech, not the other way around.
For example, to support more extensively those newspapers or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all, all these unofficial content creators.
There are also some things which feel very strange, like the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is".
Can you direct me to that in info?
When people ask you what your business model is, they are asking you how you are going to do this.