Netscape's 9 Lives

For those of you who've been working in the internet industry for many years, it may bring feelings of nostalgia reading the latest headlines about the newest incarnation of Netscape. Netscape has always been the perpetual internet underdog - even in it's hey day when it dominated the browser market, it never generated meaningful amounts of cash. Netscape first released the beta versions of its browser in 1994, and peaked towards the end of 1995 with over 80% market share. Today, under AOL's stewardship, it has a 1% market share.

In an ironic twist of fate, Netscape now finds itself in a position of dominance. But alas, its challenger is no longer Microsoft or other Internet Titans; it's found itself a worthier challenger, a young internet startup that launched in December 1994, Digg.

Digg is a website with an emphasis on technology and science news. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.

This week Netscape launched in beta a new portal that mirrors substantially Digg: users can submit, and then vote for, new stories that are promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. The man behind this reinvention of Netscape is Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc., which was acquired by AOL in October 2005. In interest of full disclosure, I know Jason, and did some business with him a few years ago. I can appreciate his efforts to reinvent an old-school Internet brand into a new media brand. However, I don't think this will meet with much success, and certainly won't be the "Digg Killer" as Michael Arrington suggests. The Netscape brand has been diluted to the point of no return and no amount of lipstick can beautify this pig.

Below is an Alexa chart comparing the site traffic of Digg and Netscape. The trends speak for themselves.


You can read Digg's CEO Jay Adelson response to Netscape here.