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> When I was at Netscape, marketing had every page of Yahoo up on a wall (printed out!), and there were teams assigned to recreating each and every one of them,

• ghshephard 5y ago
  So - Netscape was three companies. Company #1 - Was the browser. Which they initially sold, but then had to give away for free. And search engines weren't really as much of a thing back then so, there was very little money coming from that, particularly after Microsoft decided to compete by giving their browser away for free. About all their was came in through stuff like banner ads and other advertising on the home page. Company #2 was where they wanted to make their money - with all the amazing back office servers, web servers (back when web servers were something worth spending $$$ on), High Performance Multi-Master LDAP Servers (still an amazing technology, even today), Calendar Servers, Mail Servers, etc, etc.. They honestly could have done something there - but (A) they were going up against Microsoft who was a fierce competitor, and (B) Their commitment to open standards made lock-in really hard.. And then there was company #3 - www.netscape.com. Mike Homer I think was the one who realized that was where the real capturable value was in 1999. And he was probably right - definitely in the short term. The marketing team worked their butt off to drive as much traffic as possible - and then sold it off to AOL for $4B. That's why they essentially duplicated, page for page, yahoo.com.