I 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 com

I 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.)