

Will Facebook End Up Like Netscape? - cwan
http://www.pehub.com/53804/will-facebook-end-up-like-netscape/

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Elepsis
I think this submission gets it entirely backwards. Netscape the company did
quite okay for itself -- its life ended with a pretty substantial acquisition
by AOL (which promptly proceeded to kill it...)

The browser, on the other hand, was killed largely by its own ineptitude.
People in today's "zomg Internet Explorer is awful" world seem to forget that
Netscape 4.5 was so bad people were proactively switching to IE, and that
Netscape 6 came out late, bloated and to a very, very harsh reception.

Sure, the grave of Netscape eventually spawned what is now Firefox, but not
before several years of soul searching and wrong paths.

~~~
drats
And Facebook has <http://lite.facebook.com> which is the sleek Firefox-like
(when Firefox was sleek at least) answer to the Netscape-like bloated full
version. Add to that "google-chrome --disable-images" and it's a nice text-
only twitterish feed of what my friends are up to.

On a related note, as a non-computer scientist who is not working in your
field who loves to read about computer science, I find the blogs referenced by
reddit and HN to be shrill pundits who aren't interesting or academic. Most of
them are on the same level as the pundits of the journalism world and often
include troll/flame bait headlines which are designed to pit two camps against
each other. They tend to be the Zed/Dvorak/TheRegister type people who all
openly confess that they are trolling. The "academic" articles referenced tend
to be mostly flamewars about comp sci education and practice that revolve
around languages rather than algorithms or interesting implementations and
libraries. I suppose the reason for this is that link sharing websites are
often oriented toward leisure time and goofing off and so people are not in a
"I want to learn a new concept" mode and just want to talk shop and gossip a
bit. It seems that, despite all the critiques of the mainstream media that
come from the digital generation, we do love this type of activity and
unmoderated we actually trend towards it.

I predict any HN startups that seek to solve the journalism/media questions
that PG wants to address will not get around this basic feature of human
psychology and will not be able to become something remarkably different
(although I am sure they have the potential to make a lot of money). Therefore
social change of a more fundamental type will come primarily in innovations
and disruptions of education rather than of media. However, the currency and
lead that universities have both in terms of branding/prestige and state-
sponsorship will prevent any major startups in this area and most innovation
will take place in university IT departments deploying open source e-education
tools. I don't think any e-education tools in the cloud will survive in the
long-term even if they can out pace development from universities in the short
term.

------
dwynings
I'm amazed by how out of context his comment was taken.

His response of “I like to pride myself on thinking pretty long term, but not
that long term. So you win,” was a joke. The question had been what were
Facebook's plans for storing their data so that 2000 years from now,
historians could analyze the it.

------
ghshephard
"But my memory is that Netscape the company was not a winner — Microsoft, IBM
and others ended up crushing it, not because of the browser wars, but because
Netscape tried to move beyond browsers into enterprise servers and didn’t have
either the resources to fight giant software companies or enough employees who
understood the corporate market."

Netscape was founded in April, 1994 went public in August, 1995, sold to AOL
for $4B in November 1998, and was worth $10B to shareholders on it's final day
of trading in Mid 1999. Not a bad 5 year run.

Netscape was also the victim of a monopolist (Microsoft) that was found to be
illegally using its monopoly to place it's browsers (Netscape's primary
product) on windows systems. I'm not really sure there is an equivalent party
who can do likewise to Facebook (I don't think Microsoft would try again, even
if it could)

