NEWS 24.11.98 Netscape has officially confirmed rumours that it is to be bought by AOL and Sun Microsystems but stated that a final agreement has yet to be reached.
AOL is the main acquirer in the deal, rumoured to be worth around $4bn, and will take on Netscape's content business. Sun will resell the company's software through a joint marketing partnership.
Clive Longbottom, strategy analyst at CSL Consulting, told Silicon.com: "It makes an enormous amount of sense for Netscape, which isn't exactly going great guns at the moment."
Longbottom said Netscape's technology will fit in well with Sun's Network-centric framework while AOL will need Netscape's help on the online front as it has fallen out of favour with Microsoft recently.
24.11.03 With hindsight, it's quite easy to say this was a deal that didn't work out. At the time, it was major news and it didn't take long for anti-Microsoft forces to start speaking about 'the rebel alliance'.
However, AOL's purchase of netcenter.com didn't amount to much and after years of dabbling with Navigator/Communicator/Mozilla, it is once again using Microsoft's IE after a settlement.
By the middle of this year, AOL had been left with a skeleton staff - not being allowed to bring your dog to work anymore was the least of most people's problems if they were still at the unit.
And the software side of Netscape - the web server and other business that most people forgot about in the Browser Wars - hardly did much better at Sun.
Sure, Sun's development as a major software player took some impetus from the acquisition and creation of what was to become - along with other initiatives and acquisitions - iPlanet, and eventually Sun ONE. But Sun's future in this space looks stronger with BEA and maybe other middleware players.
A true rebel alliance? MSN and Microsoft's core software didn't get knocked off their stride and, rightly so, the US government didn't take Microsoft's spin that the deal would "pull the rug from under the [DoJ's anti-trust] case".
