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They did it by making the single worst mistake that any software company can make:They decided to rewrite the code from scratch, moving from netscape 4.0 to 6.0 which needed 3 years to complete. Three years is an awfully long time in the internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

Netscape wasn't the first company to make this mistake. Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one.

Sol kenworthy

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14y ago

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