4 ms·

I think this submission gets it entirely backwards. Netscape the company did quite okay for itself -- its life ended with a pretty substantial acquisition by AO

by Elepsis 17y ago

I think this submission gets it entirely backwards. Netscape the company did quite okay for itself -- its life ended with a pretty substantial acquisition by AOL (which promptly proceeded to kill it...) The browser, on the other hand, was killed largely by its own ineptitude. People in today's "zomg Internet Explorer is awful" world seem to forget that Netscape 4.5 was so bad people were proactively switching to IE, and that Netscape 6 came out late, bloated and to a very, very harsh reception. Sure, the grave of Netscape eventually spawned what is now Firefox, but not before several years of soul searching and wrong paths.

drats 17y ago
And Facebook has http://lite.facebook.com http://lite.facebook.com which is the sleek Firefox-like (when Firefox was sleek at least) answer to the Netscape-like bloated full version. Add to that "google-chrome --disable-images" and it's a nice text-only twitterish feed of what my friends are up to. On a related note, as a non-computer scientist who is not working in your field who loves to read about computer science, I find the blogs referenced by reddit and HN to be shrill pundits who aren't interesting or academic. Most of them are on the same level as the pundits of the journalism world and often include troll/flame bait headlines which are designed to pit two camps against each other. They tend to be the Zed/Dvorak/TheRegister type people who all openly confess that they are trolling. The "academic" articles referenced tend to be mostly flamewars about comp sci education and practice that revolve around languages rather than algorithms or interesting implementations and libraries. I suppose the reason for this is that link sharing websites are often oriented toward leisure time and goofing off and so people are not in a "I want to learn a new concept" mode and just want to talk shop and gossip a bit. It seems that, despite all the critiques of the mainstream media that come from the digital generation, we do love this type of activity and unmoderated we actually trend towards it. I predict any HN startups that seek to solve the journalism/media questions that PG wants to address will not get around this basic feature of human psychology and will not be able to become something remarkably different (although I am sure they have the potential to make a lot of money). Therefore social change of a more fundamental type will come primarily in innovations and disruptions of education rather than of media. However, the currency and lead that universities have both in terms of branding/prestige and state-sponsorship will prevent any major startups in this area and most innovation will take place in university IT departments deploying open source e-education tools. I don't think any e-education tools in the cloud will survive in the long-term even if they can out pace development from universities in the short term.

by Elepsis 17y ago

drats 17y ago

And Facebook has http://lite.facebook.com http://lite.facebook.com which is the sleek Firefox-like (when Firefox was sleek at least) answer to the Netscape-like bloated full version. Add to that "google-chrome --disable-images" and it's a nice text-only twitterish feed of what my friends are up to. On a related note, as a non-computer scientist who is not working in your field who loves to read about computer science, I find the blogs referenced by reddit and HN to be shrill pundits who aren't interesting or academic. Most of them are on the same level as the pundits of the journalism world and often include troll/flame bait headlines which are designed to pit two camps against each other. They tend to be the Zed/Dvorak/TheRegister type people who all openly confess that they are trolling. The "academic" articles referenced tend to be mostly flamewars about comp sci education and practice that revolve around languages rather than algorithms or interesting implementations and libraries. I suppose the reason for this is that link sharing websites are often oriented toward leisure time and goofing off and so people are not in a "I want to learn a new concept" mode and just want to talk shop and gossip a bit. It seems that, despite all the critiques of the mainstream media that come from the digital generation, we do love this type of activity and unmoderated we actually trend towards it. I predict any HN startups that seek to solve the journalism/media questions that PG wants to address will not get around this basic feature of human psychology and will not be able to become something remarkably different (although I am sure they have the potential to make a lot of money). Therefore social change of a more fundamental type will come primarily in innovations and disruptions of education rather than of media. However, the currency and lead that universities have both in terms of branding/prestige and state-sponsorship will prevent any major startups in this area and most innovation will take place in university IT departments deploying open source e-education tools. I don't think any e-education tools in the cloud will survive in the long-term even if they can out pace development from universities in the short term.