What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

Re:What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know not... by keeda on Monday May 19, 2025 @01:37AM (#44026740)

Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because:

1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.

2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)

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Re:What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know not... by youngtaff on Monday May 19, 2025 @02:43AM (#44027046)

> Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE

The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally

Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)

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