3 ms·
It should be said, despite the massive stupidity of how AOL handled what they bought, that their primary motivation might have been to use it as a bargaining ch
by rossdavidh 8y ago
It should be said, despite the massive stupidity of how AOL handled what they bought, that their primary motivation might have been to use it as a bargaining chip with Microsoft: "play nice, or we'll make Netscape the default browser for AOL". At the time, that would have made IE a minority browser again, IIRC.
- asadotzler 8y agoI think it was more than that. They paid $4.2B for Netscape. I think they wanted Netscape's presence on the Web. They were a walled garden dial-up era media company with a lucrative subscription base trying to migrate their business to something for the broadband era - the Web. Netscape had a top 10 website and that was in big part because it was the default home page for Netscape's browser, used by half of the people on the Web that year. They wanted that package, IMO. (And maybe they bought some vision from Netscape about a Java-connected internet of things.)
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAOL already had its own built-in browser (the imaginatively titled "AOL Browser"), although it used the IE rendering engine under the hood IIRC.