"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
.. .

In Netscape's case, the competition didn't "improve." They stole
proprietary code and used massive personnel resources to get it to
market before the smaller company.

Who cares? I use wahtever works best and that's still mozilla for me..

That was a dark week. I was there the day they came in and told a bunch of
the engineers that AOL was integrating their software (Instant Messenger),
which was the harbinger. They knew it was a matter of time before AOL
merged with Netscape. It all went downhill from there, which is how there's
Firefox.

'Course, I hear the new Internet Explorer has many of the internal and
external features of Firefox.

I wouldn't expect people in Europe to understand how that sort of thing
happened in terms of web
browsers, word processors, spreadsheets and other "Microsoft products"
that bear striking resemblances to former competitors.

Yeah, they're still using two tin cans and piecs of string there.

Well, more importantly, they don't have exposure to the Silicon Valley or
Seattle scuttlebutt that you find on the West Coast as technology types
shift jobs and interact over time. One time, Netscape and Microsoft shared
an outsourced call center in Oregon under a rule that they couldn't be in
the same room together. Not only were they in the same room, only a cube
wall separated them. I was there as a technical writer. A Netscape
contractor turned on a computer, the circuit-breaker flipped....and Win95
technical support went down.

Stream International lied bigtime to cover that one up, and separated the
teams, but for awhile Netscape tech support could hear Win95 support techs
on the telephone. Some of those guys jumped from one team to the other.

(If that wasn't sleazy enough, they sold a contract to a great
company--Adobe--who required domestic, US-based technical support. So the
calls came into the Oregon office and then auto-forwarded to Nova Scotia or
somewhere. Right now I work with guys who were sent to Canada on a project,
only to learn that they were there to train their replacements. A
non-disclosure agreement prevented them from divulging what was happening to
Adobe.)

-c