Spyglass, a Pioneer, Learns Hard Lessons About Microsoft nytimes.com
Another old story from Monday's NYT, mainly of historical interest. While the Washington Post was busy puffing up politically naive Bill, that other major newspaper was exploring some interesting issues. This story's about the second biggest bonehead deal of the century, when Spyglass cut their own throats by selling out cheap to Bill. Of course, they held out for a while, Microsoft's original offer was $100k.
Reggie will tell you whenever "free IE" comes up that it's no worse than Nav winning out over all the other Mosaic variants available at the beginning. Somehow, that's not quite how the Spyglass guys see it.
Microsoft talked to Netscape about licensing its browser, then struck a deal with Spyglass in December 1994 for $2 million, for use with its Windows 95 operating system.
Later licensing deals to use Spyglass technology on other operating systems, including Apple's Macintosh and Windows 3.1, and a final payment for all future use brought the total that Microsoft paid to Spyglass to $13.1 million.
By the end of 1995, Spyglass had also licensed Mosaic to 82 other companies, including IBM and Digital Equipment, for use in their software products. The revenue stream from the licensing deals was around $20 million a year.
But a month earlier, in December 1995, when Gates announced that Microsoft was shifting its product development to "embrace and extend" the Internet, he also said Microsoft would be giving its browser away. A byproduct was that the Spyglass browser licensing revenue quickly disappeared, as smaller Internet software companies went out of business and many big customers shifted to Microsoft's free browser.
"Twenty million in revenues went away - poof - in a year," Colbeth said.
So, there's another point of view. Colbeth isn't going to say anything bad about Bill and company, he just wants to stay as far away from them as possible. Colbeth Just Doesn't Understand that there's no place to hide.
Cheers, Dan |
