Netscape

Una y otra vez oigo por todos los lados aquello de "Microsoft utilizó tácticas monopolísticas para acabar con Netscape", cuando realmente no es verdad. Parece que muy poca gente ha leido La entrevista de Arstechnica a Scott Collins, trabajador de Netscape desde Netscape 3.0 (ahora está en trolltech), donde se dan pistas de lo que realmente ocurrió con Netscape. Que Microsoft utilizó tácticas monopolísticas está claro, pero que la perdida de cuota de mercado de Netscape se debió solo a eso es FALSO, Netscape se pego un tiro a la cabeza (a la de su producto), y para muestra, este trozo de la entrevista:

Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?

One: There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.

Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name