Fergie's Tech Blog

4 April 1994: Netscape Communications is Founded

Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape web browsers as well as many other Internet and Intranet client and server software products. It was never a very large company by revenues, but it played a significant role in the popularisation of the internet, and a central role in the Microsoft anti-trust case. It was a classic internet bubble stock. The company only existed from 1994 to 2003, latterly as a subsidiary of AOL, but the Netscape brand is still in use.

The company was founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, and was the first company to attempt to capitalize on the nascent World Wide Web. It released a web browser called Mosaic Netscape 0.9 on October 13, 1994. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took on the 'Netscape' name on November 14, 1994 to avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser. (The Mosaic Netscape web browser shared no code with NCSA Mosaic.)

Netscape had a successful IPO on August 9, 1995. The stock was to be offered at $14 per share; a last-minute decision doubled the initial offering to $28 per share; the stock's value reached $75 on the first day of trading, which was nearly a record for a stock's first-day gain. The company's revenues doubled every quarter in 1995.

One of Netscape's stated goals was to "level the playing field" among operating systems by providing a consistent web browsing experience across them. The Netscape web browser interface was identical on any computer. Netscape later experimented with prototypes of a web-based system which would allow a user to access and edit his files anywhere across a network, no matter what computer or operating system he happened to be using.

This did not escape the attention of Microsoft, which viewed the commoditization of operating systems as a direct threat to its bottom line. Several Microsoft executives are reported to have visited the Netscape campus in June 1995 to propose dividing the market, which would have allowed Microsoft to produce web browser software on Windows while leaving other operating systems to Netscape. Netscape refused.

posted by Fergie @ 4/03/2006 10:01:00 PM