The Return of Netscape
Posted by: kmikeym | From: June 19, 2006
Remember Netscape? It's okay, me neither. It was gobbled up by AOL at one point during the hype-fueled days when we all made a lot of money and the Superbowl commercials were really fun. Then it just sort of sat there getting old and stagnant.
More recently, in a move that surprised no one, Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc., sold his blog empire to AOL and took a job there. I like Mr. Calacanis and I respect him (I have a Google News Alert to keep up on him), but his blog empire seemed from the start to be designed to be bought out. Because of that, it felt short-sighted. And it is a srategy in diect contrast to the orginal blog empire of Nick Denton. Denton seems to be building a sustained media business while Calacanis was capitalizing on the blogging trend in order to make a pile of money (which is, I suppose, what business does).
So AOL now has a bunch of blogs, which keep on blogging, and they have Jason Calacanis. Recently it was revealed that Jason is now heading up Netscape, which was a surprise only in that people didn't realize Netscape was around or meant anything, and they are going to emulate the success of Digg.com. This of course pisses off the web community of Digg, who feel like they are being ripped off. But it's looking like this is sort of Jason's MO. Emulate a successful web-based enterprise but make it more commercially viable. Less risk and more money.
More interesting to me than the politics of the situation is that they are using the Netscape name for this. Netscape made a web browser, and now will be a user-filtered news aggregator with editorial followup. I guess AOL thinks there is still value in the Netscape name (or least the domain). From browser software to web based news aggregator? Pretty rad.
So far Netscape Beta seems to be moving really slow. The stories on the front page have between 4 and votes. Over on Digg.com the stories have between 51 and 899 votes, suggesting a a whole lot more users. But I think Netscape is going to win, because Digg is "nerd news" and a niche site. Netscape is going to be like Google News, but filtered by humans instead of a robot. This means instead of stories on wikis, iTunes, and the other technology stories on Digg you get international, business, and other "real" news. Netscape is taking the Digg model and making it more mainstream. (plus adding an extra layer of actual reporting on top of it)
In the end, it hardly matters. People always get upset when big companies do something that a little company has been doing. It's like when that band you like gets really big and pretty soon you are hearing the music you loved in your bedroom on a VW ad. You feel like the new fans aren't as valid as you because you liked their earlier stuff, not just the new album that is getting all the airplay. You feel like someone stole your culture. People get continually upset about this, even though it happens over and over and over. It happens so often that it seems like an established part of the path of pop culture. Successful things grow, and the success isn't always done by the people who started it. In fact, it seems like that is rarely the case. Remember Netscape? Me neither.
It took a while for me to stop being pissed at things like this too. For the developers of business models that get copied, either the business is a lifestyle business or it has a "sustainable competitive advantage". If it has a sustainable competitive advantage (also called an unfair advantage), the copier won't be able to shut you down.
If you break down the world into explorers and farmers, we are the cultural explorers, finding the latest, greatest, newest, craziest whatever. The book "Conquest of Cool" relates how businesses, like ad agencies, hired explorer types of the time to bring the ideas of their peers into ad campaigns in the '60's - it hasn't changed. (I heard they are planning a TV series set in a '60's ad agency and thinking of running commercials of the era for companies who are still around in the breaks. Supposedly it was the era of the 3 martini lunch, especially in that crowd. - Search "Mad Men" AMC)
So the explorers declare success and move on and the farmers take over.
Posted by: rob at June 19, 2006 3:58 PM