Thomas Friedman in his book "The world is flat" explains about the ten flatteners of the world. He also mentions the axis that changes the world - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the PC, Netscape...
Netscape had one of the most amazing deployment strategies sin the industry. Netscape Navigator was based on the Mosaic web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money.
On 13.10.1994 Netscape announced that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users. Netscape's initial corporate policy regarding Navigator is interesting, as it claimed that it would make Navigator freely available for non-commercial use in accordance with the notion that Internet software should be distributed for free.
However, two months later, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.
The versions were available for free download with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high."
When the consumer Internet revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto standard, particularly on the Windows platform.The media hype deffinetely helped to estabslish its leading position. Of course it became even more renowened for the on-the-fly display of web pages,where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. During the 1990s, important new features included cookies, frames, and JavaScript (in version 2.0).
According to Wikipedia, the browser remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share. Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
During that time Microsoft entered the market, using the code from Spyglass to create Internet Explorer. Microsoft's browser were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0 (1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively. In the meantime the 4.0 version of Netscape became crashy and buggy, helping the demise of the browser. Important factor was the entrance of other open-source browsers and the deal between Microsoft and Apple, that the latter will use IE as the default browser in Mac OS for Macintosh.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla, Netscape Navigator's original code name.
Resources:
Friedman, Thomas.The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.2007
Netscape Navigator. (2010, December 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:45, December 8, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Netscape_Navigator&oldid=400669043
