
AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998) - kkaefer
https://money.cnn.com/1998/11/24/technology/aol/
======
asadotzler
Good contemporary read: [https://www-
archive.mozilla.org/fear.html](https://www-archive.mozilla.org/fear.html)

jwz was right, the source code was out there and even though AOL eventually
gave up on browser tech, the code lived on to become Firefox, re-igniting
competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward, and providing
an independent browser that's beholden to users first.

~~~
zeroname
> ...re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward

I fondly remember when the selling point of Firebird/Firefox was that it isn't
a bloated, sluggish piece of crap unlike all other major browsers (including
Netscape) at the time.

Back then, it was still possible to develop a web browser without hundreds of
millions of dollars in budget. Fast forward to how the web platform has
"progressed" and browsers are again sluggish, bloated pieces of crap, but now
that horrible technology also powers far more applications. We've dug
ourselves into a hole that we can't get out of anymore.

~~~
dageshi
I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load,
like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt
like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was
loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison.

That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's
no browser with that level of annoyance I don't think.

~~~
megablast
Well sure, IE loaded all that crap when windows loaded.

~~~
MiddleEndian
Even on Mac OS back then, IE was the better faster option of the two.
Obviously it got left in the dust afterwards.

------
Apocryphon
TIME Magazine: Visions 21- June 19, 2000.

Will AOL Own Everything? America Online could do in the early 21st century
what Microsoft did at the end of the 20th: control the flow of key
technologies

by Lawrence Lessig

pg. 9-11: [https://transition.fcc.gov/transaction/aol-
tw/exparte/disney...](https://transition.fcc.gov/transaction/aol-
tw/exparte/disney_exparte071100.pdf)

------
Reedx
There's a good Netscape documentary filmed during their last year leading up
to the acquisition. When they were working to get the Mozilla source code
released.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y)

~~~
vxNsr
at 53:30 one of the engineers says " _We 're at the beginning of an industry
and who knows where that industry's gonna go? This could all turn into
television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who
decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that._"

Sounds pretty prescient considering current events.

~~~
DINKDINK
>one of the engineers

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski)

There's lots of old-school people in that documentary. Brewster Kahle

~~~
vxNsr
I figured all these guys/girl are probably a big deal now but I don't know
anything about SV culture or history.

------
fallous
I was at Netscape at the time of the acquisition. When they offered buy-outs
for employees that would volunteer for layoffs I gleefully waved my hand and
left.

~~~
IntelMiner
Why would they buy you out to be laid off? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep
that kind of talent?

~~~
surge
Right, this seems dumb as you're going to lose your best people first, since
they're the ones knowing they'll have no issues finding something else on the
open job market.

~~~
colechristensen
On the other hand you also get rid of the people that don't want to be there.

------
ransom1538
I worked with a guy that was at AOL during the sale to TimeWarner. Apparently,
in a large layoff round, they gave everyone a check for 6 months of salary and
everyone went to a bar. The party was legendary. Lay-off + cash + lots of
alcohol = cops + fights + tears.

~~~
jrnichols
I was at Netscape in Mountain View during that time, and i don't remember
anyone getting a check that big at all. The severance checks weren't small,
but nowhere near 6 months.

I did not get laid off (was part of Netcenter ops) but other friends did. A
few months before the layoffs, they were all reorganized into one group too.

They had 2 meetings - morning meeting? laid off. Afternoon meeting? still
employed. People were paged to one of the two meetings. A friend i was staying
with was paged to the morning meeting, but thought "Eh, i'll just sleep in and
go with you to the later one." Cue a bunch of pages and phone calls saying
"you need to be in the morning meeting" and we just knew that things were not
going to go well at all.

I ended up leaving that job shortly after, and honestly, I regret leaving to
this day. I thought that we were all fixing to get re-org'd again or laid off
a few months later, but i could have stayed there for a few more years easily.
Sigh. Hindsight is 20/20, they say.

------
aninteger
Thankfully Netscape decided to release the source code for "Mozilla" before
this acquisition took place.

------
shshhdhs
In 1998, $1 was worth $1.53 (in 2018 dollars), so this transaction would feel
like a $6.4B deal.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Yeah, but Netscape was purchased with AOL stock, which was wildly inflated at
the time, so you could also argue it feels like a couple hundred mil deal
given the eventual tanking of AOL stock.

That was the thing about a lot of the huge deals of the original dotcom
bubble. Most of them were made at inflated prices with (inflated) stock of the
purchaser, but it's not like anyone ever paid that much cash for the total
amount of those shares. That's one reason when the bubble burst that while
painful it wasn't devastating to the overall economy: most of the insane
valuations were never fully "realized" in the first place, so when they fell
back to earth it really didn't wipe out as much wealth as the headline numbers
made it seem.

------
Scuds

      AOL, an industry behemoth with 14 million subscribers, will 
      acquire Netscape's Navigator and Communicator software, its 
      e-commerce software, and its Netcenter Internet "portal" 
      site, one of the 10 most-visited sites on the Internet.
    

The portal was supposed to be the real cash cow, here. Buying eyeballs in the
early era of internet ads.

Q: What's a portal?

A: Yes, exactly.

~~~
tyingq
>Q: What's a portal?

Alexa, Ok Google, App Stores, AMP and it's relationship with carousel widgets,
etc.

~~~
code_duck
I thought the answer was ‘Facebook without any activity from friends’ or
‘twitter’

------
bdz
And the two attached sound files are still working. Pretty crazy actually

~~~
booleandilemma
And it's a very prescient comment for a company that wasn't ultimately
successful:

 _...we call the "AOL anywhere strategy" and although predominantly people use
personal computers, over the next few years we think a variety of internet
devices, some pocket devices, some television devices, will become more and
more important and working with Sun and Java as well as other operating
systems we want to create the best possible set, kind of a family of these
internet devices for AOL and for Netscape._

Of course Java would end up on those "pocket devices" in the form of Android.

------
aasasd
Alright, the article itself is not so interesting (for me) as the fact that
CNN apparently keeps the entire design for an article from '98.

~~~
nly
The BBC does the same. Here is their coverage of the same story:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/221295.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/221295.stm)
. The navigation links on the side even still work.

Presumably pages were either statically generated AOT, or edited directly back
then.

------
drawkbox
This was largely a patent buy, they later sold them to Microsoft for a billion
in 2012 [1], which Facebook ended up buying 650 of the 800 they bought from
AOL [2].

[1] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-buys-netscape-web-
pa...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-buys-netscape-web-patents-from-
aol-to-attack-google/)

[2] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/facebook-will-
bu...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/facebook-will-buy-650-aol-
patents-from-microsoft/)

------
empath75
Aol (now oath) in Ashburn still has a Mozilla statue in the front hallway —
it’s a Pokémon Go gym, for some reason, even though only Aol employees can get
close enough to it.

~~~
jrnichols
I have two pairs of boxer shorts that came from the Netscape company store.
They are still in great shape (i don't actually _wear_ them..) that have the
Netscape logo and Mozilla the character on them.

I wish I didn't actually wear (and wear out) my Netscape Communicator
t-shirts. And I'm also kicking myself for not buying a bunch of other logo
items!

~~~
Ibethewalrus
Tried Cafepress?

------
rossdavidh
It should be said, despite the massive stupidity of how AOL handled what they
bought, that their primary motivation might have been to use it as a
bargaining chip with Microsoft: "play nice, or we'll make Netscape the default
browser for AOL". At the time, that would have made IE a minority browser
again, IIRC.

~~~
asadotzler
I think it was more than that. They paid $4.2B for Netscape. I think they
wanted Netscape's presence on the Web. They were a walled garden dial-up era
media company with a lucrative subscription base trying to migrate their
business to something for the broadband era - the Web. Netscape had a top 10
website and that was in big part because it was the default home page for
Netscape's browser, used by half of the people on the Web that year. They
wanted that package, IMO. (And maybe they bought some vision from Netscape
about a Java-connected internet of things.)

------
linkmotif
Internet Radio Podcast first 10-15 episode cover this in great detail. Was so
interesting for me.
[http://www.internethistorypodcast.com](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com)

------
tzury
And sold to Verizon by $4.1B later on...

If you want to see the entire history of AOL acquisitions look here [1].

As the list grew, there was a sense in the crowd that AOL is a cemetery for
startups. That is, ,buying them in, and then shortly afterwards, they die.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL)

------
sys_64738
AOL Keyword: Netscape

~~~
ksherlock
I think of that every time I see an ad with a facebook page, instagram, or
twitter handle.

------
triptych
Worst thing for the web ever

