Today was like the real day of summer here. It’s warm out, the trees are in full bloom, and I took advantage of the sunshine to walk around my neighborhood (the Upper West Side of New York City) and take some pictures.
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
