From: Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endtech.com)
Date: Wed May 17 2000 - 23:20:28 PDT
Okay, but what about the single biggest reason? Everyone
was telling management to get on board this e-commerce thing
when instead they were much more interested in doing calendaring
and scheduling. It *was* the hackers that were trying to dictate
what they should be doing. but the execs didn't recognize they
value and put them down the path of doing things that only
benefited execs that need stuff like calendaring & scheduling.
Actually, re-reading through this list, I don't think there's
any of the items that I agree with.
Greg
Adam Rifkin -4K wrote:
>
> Time to play Monday morning quarterback.
>
> After reading Charles Ferguson's story of Vermeer _High St@kes No
> Prisoners_ and Michael Lewis' homage to Jim Clark _The New New Thing_ I
> have become morbidly obsessed with the reasons for Netscape's failure
> and the point of no return after which this company could not have been
> saved. These authors imply that poor decisions were made early on which
> gave the company a snowball's chance in hell of surviving.
>
> >From reading the Ferguson tirage and the back-and-forth between Lewis
> and Clark, we find that Netscape had:
> (1) No architecture, and no architectural strategy
> (2) Poor management, many of whom didn't understand the implications of (1)
> (3) Unwarranted arrogance, especially when dealing with Microsoft
> (4) Inability to keep third-party developers happy
> (5) Overemphasis on cross-platforming the browser,
> underemphasis on cross-platforming the server
> (6) Inability to make the right technology acquisitions
> (7) Refusal to acknowledge the strengths of Apache
> (8) Inability to create and control industry standards
> (9) Too much willingness to let the hackers dictate technology policy
>
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