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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: drmorgan who wrote (18046)	3/17/1998 11:50:00 AM
From: Scott Pease	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Scott, tell us how you would run the company, perhaps NSCP's management will take your advice. How would you have dealt with MSFT after they declared war on you? Do you know something that NSCP doesn't? It looks to me that they don't plan on making money in the browser business, they are into into servers etc. And everyone keeps talking about browsers and because of this or that issue with browsers means the death of NSCP, thats a bunch of BS. NSCP may be bought but they are not going to die. I am not a back seat driver. If I wanted to steer Netscape's direction, I would work for them. I want to share in their success, so I bought their stock. They did not succeed. Saying that, I think there are many, many, many obvious flaws at Netscape - STILL! They have a very arrogant attitude. "Windows is nothing but a set of device drivers" is a famous quote attributed to MarkA. Communicator is no longer a best-of-breed product. There is total chaos of out Netscape on what exactly constitutes Communicator 5.0 (remember all those dreams of a single desktop, Aurora, etc?). NetCaster was a disaster, it was a terrible product and has had absolutely no follow up (same for Microsoft and Channels though). They have not yet done a good job bundling their server software (there is no equivalent "BackOffice" or IBM e-Commerce suite). Their browser product is not modularized and fairly bloated. What the hell was the deal with spinning off Actra and then folding it back in (that must have been great for morale). I won't even go into their ineptness in maximizing profits with THE NUMBER ONE INTERNET SITE (giving the keys away to Yahoo essentially). Ultimately they still feel completely unfocused. It might be a product of being a public company, where the pressure to turn a profit or grow revenue is extreme. They made the decision to go public, and they have to live with it now. I don't hate Netscape, I feel sad at the opportunity they let slip through their grasp. Just like Apple had an enormous chance to change the world and break Wintel, Netware had a chance, and Netscape had a chance, all three completely blew it. Sun and IBM I think are generally doing the right moves, although Sun needs to hype less and deliver more -- anyone who has tried to build a real app with JDK 1.1 knows how weak it still is. The only good upshot is that I think most tech-people realize now what it takes to compete with Microsoft, and the next "thing" (nanotech, VR, biotech, etc.) thats brought by a small company will hopefully have a leadership that knows what it takes to beat wintel. Netscape died to save the world? :-)