Netscaped

Netscaped is a euphemism for when a company is hurt or put out of business as a result of head-to-head competition with Microsoft Corp. Microsoft's size, resources and expertise mean there is always a risk when another firm tries to steal market share from any of its divisions. Many competitors have tried to beat the software giant and ended up suffering serious damage.

The term "netscaped" is derived from the rapid rise and fall of the company Netscape in the 1990s. In those early days of the internet, Netscape, which had been founded by Marc Andreessen and James Clark in 1994, ruled — thanks to its cutting-edge browser, named Navigator. It was the most popular (in fact, for a brief time, the only) software for searching the World Wide Web. In that era, websites that featured little more than plain text and basic inline images were considered revolutionary.

Netscape was where many people first experienced the internet. Its success did not go unnoticed. Microsoft, already a software giant, with a dominant share of the computer operating system market, poured huge resources into developing its own browser, Internet Explorer, which it launched in 1995 bundled into Windows 95. Shortly after, Netscape went public in what was the largest IPO on Wall Street at the time. Ironically, Microsoft developed Explorer by licensing some of Netscape's own technology (a common Microsoft tactic).

Netscape and Internet Explorer competed in lockstep throughout 1995 and 1996, constantly upping each other's browser with new releases (see: What were the "Browser Wars?"). But the edge eventually went to Explorer, not because it was a superior product, but because Microsoft gave it away for free by bundling it within its Windows operating system (OS). In contrast, Netscape had to be bought and installed separately on a computer.

So, in the end, Microsoft won simply because everyone needed an operating system and most people bought Windows. By summer 1998, Explorer had become the most popular browser. A hobbled Netscape was bought out by America Online that year for $4.2 billion; a few more versions of Navigator came out in the next decade but overall development lagged. Netscape was finally shut down in 2008.

Some critics questioned the legality of Microsoft's strategy of bundling Explorer into its OS, and indeed, the practice figured in the series of anti-competition lawsuits that Microsoft faced in the 2000s, though that wasn't enough to save Netscape. But its Navigator lives on in a sense. In January 1998, Netscape announced its intention to release the Navigator source code to the public, a move that gave rise to the Mozilla organization, which created the browser Firefox — which could be downloaded for free.