Fernando Cassia has written a short commentary/opinoin on how Netscape was years ahead of where Google is today in terms of innovation and then bemoans the fact that AOL, both before the merger and after, with Time Warner, quit innovating and investing in the future in order to show repeated quarterly gains.
It's true. Look at Netscape's calendar application. Google is just doing that now. Netscape was doing it in 1999! It's a sad tale of greed over planning for the future.
Jack
Hey!. Thanks for linking to my INQ story!.
ReplyDeleteKudos from down under and keep up the good work.
Fernando Cassia - Buenos Aires, Argentina
Jack,
ReplyDeleteNetscape actually had it before 1999: a company called Collabra (I think I have that spelled right), which Netscape eventually bought out, had a whole suite of addons for Netscape as far back as 1995. I was one of the beta testers for those folks - the company was in the same building in Mountain View as MobileComm (a former employer). A bunch of us in the office (my entire tech staff) used it and it was great. We even had them include a module that would let one send a page to one of our alpha-numeric pagers via our internet gateway (MobileComm was the first paging/wireless datacom company to offer such a service, which we started in the Bay Area in late 1994). Ahhh the good old days . . .
Bill_B