Netscaped
Categories: Company Management
You don't want this. You don't want to be Netscaped.
Even though the company pioneered the web browser, trying to make the production of computer software open-ish for everyone (without having to pay Microsoft royalties or adhere to their awful, arcane dot.net system), MSFT crushed NSCP. Netscape threw rocks at the giant and, one day, it just yawned and crushed them.
How? Well, first it created the Explorer browser, which it just gave away for free, making the $30/seat license fee that NSCP was charging...high. Yeah, hard to compete with free. Then, when using Explorer, if you went to www.netscape.com, your computer basically turned off or froze violently. And there were other landmines along the way for developers and others. Netscape suffered the slings and arrows of early internet love, a spectacular stock price, and a lack of understanding that they were not, in fact, in the software business; they were in the media business. They could have paid 10% of their market cap to buy Yahoo at one point. And they didn't.
So being Netscaped means, more or less, being so full of yourself that you don't understand the competitive environment you're in...and then, in Darwinian fashion, you become a dodo. If you weren't one already.