We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. 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. 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. 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. Netscape wasn’t the first company to make this mistake. They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they? It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta.
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