On one of the BlueOxen collaboration lists, Murray Altheim provides a bit of background on the browser wars during the Spyglass years (prompted by reference to a piece (pdf) on something called "Interpretive Structured Modeling". The story rings true to some old reading I did (when we were trying to figure out how to be a nimble group in a larger organization, a bunch of us tried to digest Cusumano and Yoffe's Competing On Internet Time which provided some insight (rather rose-tinted, if memory serves) into the methods used by Netscape - plan to be big, grow quickly, build the systems to sustain that early, etc).

It'd be interesting to review the Netscape work anew, given Netscape's change and redeployment of assets throughout Sun, AOL, and Open Source....

[Altheim's encapsulation also rings true with the David Bank's work "Breaking Windows, though I don't recall that work getting into the economic details of the arrangement. ]

In any case, Altheim provides a nice snapshot of what happened in those years, a good snippet to digest

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Posted by esinclai at January 23, 2006 06:29 AM |