| Thursday, July 17, 2003 |
13:49 - Turn off the light
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/31765.html
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Netscape is dead.
And I don't mean it in some sniffy, pseudo-poetic, God-is-dead kind of way, the way we've all been saying it with resignation since the Judge Jacksons of the world gave way to the Judge Kollar-Kotellys. I mean it quite literally. Dead, buried, paved over. Debranded.
I found this Register story this morning, but heard the sad tale last night from a friend (whom I'll call "Fred", because he still works there), and The Reg has it just about right. Except for the on-the-ground stories, such as of cranes taking down the last Netscape logos from the walls, and hundreds of employees being instructed to report to Security so as to have their badges overlaid with AOL decals to obscure the once-proud N, the Company Who Must Not Be Named from now until forever.
Orlowski points out that when AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, it had market-share parity with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It had more than that, as Fred noted. It had something like 59%. Because IE at that point was so slow, buggy, and lacking in basic features, nobody really imagined that IE's growing slice of the market had anything to do with technical merit; rather, everyone knew it was because it was included by default in Windows 98. Get it under everybody's noses first, and then worry about people's petty demands for functionality. You can't compete with "free" or "ubiquitous", even with a demonstrably superior product. And so Netscape, starting with a seemingly unassailable lead, was falling further and further behind in the market, no matter what it did.
But the real fucker of the matter, Fred mentioned, was this:
On the one hand, the corrupt suits at AOL failed to appreciate the majesty of the Mozilla code, pulled features (such as blocking pop-up windows which AOL's advertisers loved, but users hated), forked willy-nilly, adding adware where they could, and generally betrayed the Great Project.
Feature after feature, innovation after innovation, Netscape's dogged developers would come up with something brilliant-- something nobody else had done-- and just on the brink of release, AOL would step in and decree that it should be removed. Pop-up blocking, ad blocking-- Netscape had it first. Where is it in the shipping 6.x/7.x? Nowhere, because AOL refused to let them ship it. (Actually it seems to be present in 7.1, released three weeks ago, in what was clearly now a last spore-flinging death throe.) Spam filtering and image blocking suffered similar fates, being allowed into the open-source Mozilla version, but yanked from the AOLified Netscape. About the only thing AOL allowed them to keep was the Gecko engine. Meanwhile, all the other browsers implemented these features lavishly and well, so that now the only browsers that don't have things like pop-up blocking are-- that's right-- Netscape and IE.
And that's the thing: Netscape wasn't falling behind its competitors because of a lack of effort or achievement, but rather because of active suppression of such achievement by AOL's suits. After all, pop-up blocking would conflict with AOL's advertising revenue, don'cha know. And the result of AOL's acting like this towards what was once a world-changing piece of software is that instead of Netscape being allowed to bow from the market in 1998, to well-earned applause and the knowledge that it left the game with its honor and respect and good name intact, AOL kept the brand alive just long enough to totally slaughter the reputation that Netscape had built up for itself. AOL didn't euthanize Netscape, which would have at least been respectful; instead, they put it in a nursing home, chained it to a bed, and read it nursery rhymes until it went mad. And then they killed it.
Fred's stories of how AOL is managed internally are nothing short of appalling. Upper-level execs micromanage from across the country, without a clue about what exactly the line people do; they take a department deep in the operational trenches that has a 99% customer satisfaction rating, change the rules of metrics so that they're judged on the same basis as call-center people (must solve problems within ten minutes or bump it up a level-- never mind that the problems this department handles take days to solve, and there's no upper level to bump things up to), and find to their astonishment the following month that it's now the worst department in the company! They impose an onerous corporate culture on employees of acquired properties; they agitate about people not wearing ties or not being in their cubicles at 7:55AM each morning, a culture shock that the Netscape employees never did quite acquiesce to. Even the Time-Warner work environment was unbearably casual to the AOL execs, who forced a culture of clueless top-down micromanagement and structure and process upon a massive organization of loose and disparate work environments, all of whom would undoubtedly have been able to work much more efficiently even than the aforementioned 99% sat rate if only they could be left alone. Employees were even, on their periodic self-evaluations, required to submit a paragraph describing their feelings on loyalty to the company. East Coast corporate politics, clearly, don't sit well with the Silicon Valley seat-of-the-pants style characteristic of just about every notable computer or Internet company except for AOL.
So I won't mourn for AOL if it collapses in on itself. But I do mourn for Netscape, a good name that suffered a knockdown punch (from Microsoft) and then a lingering, poisonous convalescence that led to a thoroughly-- undeservedly-- ignominious death.
There are some lessons we can learn from this, however. We've known for some time, from first-hand experience, the problems with integrating a web browser into an operating system, both made by the same company. Even aside from antitrust-style arguments, it's been shown that having IE woven into Windows introduces a whole plethora of technological and user-interface issues, not least of which is the decidedly ill-informed effort to blur the line between local files and web-based resources, between your own desktop and a Web page. (Surely poor users are bewildered enough without having to try to cram these wildly disparate metaphors into the same mental boxes.) A bug in the browser, such as the one in which IE goes into a brain-dead loop if it encounters a JPEG with XML data in it and refuses to load any more images until you kill the process or reboot, can hobble the OS and its usability. Having the same company in charge of an operating system and a web browser is a dangerous business, and the interface between the two concepts has to be much more carefully managed than Microsoft was willing to accept was the case back when it first floated its inspired integration plans in 1998.
But we also now know that a potentially much larger conflict of interest can arise when the company that makes the browser is also a media company. It was in Netscape's interest to provide its users with the means with which to block unwanted ads, but it was in AOL's interest to keep unfettered access to its users' eyeballs. The two divisions were thoroughly at odds. A media company is going to behave like AOL/Time-Warner does, turning a web browser into a conduit for advertising and purchasing; whereas a company whose goal is to simplify and empower the user of a web browser for its own sake will develop features which defeat that very commercializing tendency. And so this is perhaps a greater risk still to the success of a browser than a clumsy attempt to integrate a browser with an operating system.
The problem, of course, is that browsers are now supposed to be free; so who has the resources to provide free browsers? Let's see: the company that makes the OS, who can bundle it for free; advertising-supported media giants; and open-source tinkerers.
Maybe Mozilla will survive in the hands of the third group, but I'm not terribly optimistic. I'd like to believe that the reason why the Mozilla developers have spent so much effort on what Orlowski calls "esoteric frameworks and note-perfect bug tracking systems that only a nerd could appreciate", rather than actual useful features, is purely AOL's onerousness, and that now that they're free of that they can concentrate on competing head-to-head with players like Opera and OmniWeb and Safari. But it may be too late for that. As Safari has indeed shown, even the Gecko engine is now too big and bloated and full of idealistic mumbo-jumbo to be as workable as the light, quick, but full-featured KHTML. The torch has removed itself from Netscape's supine hand and jumped to a new carrier, and while there will always be contenders against IE-- which after all still has woefully inadequate CSS support and none of the user-convenience features that AOL wouldn't allow into Netscape either-- they're not going to be following Netscape's ideological example anymore.
We have AOL to thank for that.
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