Build Date: Sat Feb 22 05:40:19 2025 UTC
I'll do my best! Don't expect too much!
-- Paul Vortex
AOL-Netscape Abandons Focus on the Browser
2001-06-11 23:14:33
"The browser is a crown jewel. However, six months from now, you won't consider Netscape to be a browser company," said Netscape President Jim Bankoff in a recent interview. In short, Netscape is throwing in the towel and will no longer compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the browser wars. IE wins.
Jim Bankoff could have announced new technologies being developed for the Netscape browser -- if Netscape was developing any. He could have talked about a new, stable version of the product that's badly needed, a version that doesn't crash every time it hits a little Flash animation, some poorly-written Javascript, or an imperfectly formatted bit of HTML -- if Netscape was actually going to release such a product.
Instead he babbled on about how Netscape is going to concentrate on building portal sites and subscription-based services for the AOL Time Warner empire.
Big, costly sites that depend on advertising revenue are DEAD. You can make a living from a subscription-based service if you're running a porn site or a really specialized niche site, but no one has been able to apply that business model to any other type of mass market site. It's been tried, and they've died.
Would someone please inform Jim that 1996 happened 5 years ago?
Yes Jim, you can't make money selling a browser when Microsoft gives one away for free with their OS. However, you CAN depend on the fact that most people never figure out how to change their default homepage, you CAN depend on the fact that any bookmarks you ship with your browser are going to still be in that browser five years later, and you CAN depend on the fact that if you ship buggy software that sooner or later people will start using something else.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
About 14 years ago when I was on a road trip and stopped in Seattle, I was invited to a party. At this party there were these little tiny glasses sitting in a flat-bottomed bowl of ice. Thin cylinders about an inch in diameter and 4 inches tall, with thick glass at the bottom. Into these were poured frozen AKVAVIT... also known as the water of life. (More...)
First there was the Bloody Mary: Vodka, Tomato Juice, Worcestershire sauce, some spices, and celery. We drank it, and it was good. Then any drink with tomato juice got a prefix of "bloody" attached to it. We drank them, and they were mostly bad. Now Pigdog gets back to basics and introduces The Bloody Dog, a drink with REAL BLOOD in it. HUMAN BLOOD. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
This was an old standby back in my poor college days. Back then the goal was to get butt fucking wasted for as little money as possible. The problem was we hated dirt cheap beer - and some weekends, even Henry's was far more lucre then we could scratch together. So we invented Red. (More...)
Extreme pimpin' under pressure ... how to tell a playa from a sucka ... keeping your hoes under control ... tips for mackin' success from Pigdog's own Terrordrone. (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
