This week Oracle expanded its effort by buying Navio, a spin-off from Netscape Communications.
Industry leaders fingered directly in the suit include top brass from Netscape Communications Corp.
CNN: U.S. counties lodge class-action suit over Internet taxation
This free utility converts your bookmarks from Netscape Navigator to Microsoft Internet Explorer and vice versa.
Internet Explorer has ruled the browser market since late 1997 when Microsoft wrested the lead from Netscape.
By far the greatest threat came from Netscape's Navigator web browser.
When the Justice Department (and later the courts) declared, in 1998, that Microsoft was guilty of monopolistic practices for bundling a free Internet Explorer with its operating system, in order to cripple a rival browser from Netscape, Mossberg wrote that a free browser better served consumers.
Each of these companies wants to strengthen its position in the corporate Internet software market, and all would benefit from buying Netscape (see box, opposite).
Justice Department lawyers and 19 states brought the antitrust case in May 1998, charging that Microsoft used illegal, anti-competitive practices in bundling its Internet Explorer browser with Windows--pushing Netscape from the browser market.
The next-generation of computer operating-system interfaces from Microsoft and Netscape is dispensing with most metaphors in favour of something that looks more like the typical text-and-image Web article than like the Mac's faux office.
Flipboard Chief Executive Mike McCue is a well-known entity in Silicon Valley from his days at Netscape and Tellme Networks, and co-founder Evan Doll is a former Apple engineer.
In the Microsoft case, the government has set out to prove, among other things, that the company withheld crucial information about the Windows operating system from such rivals as Netscape, Apple and (ironically) Intel.
Just as important, Netscape would benefit from being acquired by any of these four companies.
When it launched last fall, the company drew strong interest, partly due to its funding from Andreessen Horowitz, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.
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The book is a behind-the-scenes look at Netscape -- from the lightbulb-over-the-head phase, through the tense all-nighter development phase, to initial public offering on Nasdaq and ultimate success.
Back then, Microsoft was just about to release Windows 95, a much-anticipated and much-delayed new operating system, but the effort had distracted it from understanding the significance of Netscape's arrival with the first commercial web-browser.
Deprived of income from browsers by Microsoft's policy of giving away its rival Internet Explorer and then making it inseparable from the Windows operating system, Netscape has had to create alternative revenue streams.
Doerr has been involved with most of those funds after joining the firm in 1980 and earned the bulk of his wealth from timely investments in companies like Amazon, Netscape and Sun Microsystem.
One year ago Netscape got 45% of its revenues from browsers.
All this leveraging proved highly effective: Netscape's share of the browser market plunged from 80% in 1996 to 30% today.
The browser, which enables people to follow Twitter and Facebook posts and chat with friends while visiting websites, was covered heavily in the media, partly because of its funding from Andreessen Horowitz, whose founder Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape.
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Which was all fine and good, except that it left Netscape without much of a business--after all, revenues from browser sales had accounted for 45% of Netscapes revenues only a year earlier.
The giant from Redmond is surely less likely now to trample on budding competitors than it was when Netscape first became a threat.
An open-source project (whose code can be altered by anybody), Firefox comes from a foundation, across the street from Google's offices, that happens to be based on the remnants of the old Netscape.
The real story in antitrust's continued popularity is not the flood of new theories, justifying a new activism, but the influence of beleaguered competitors like Netscape and the self-serving arguments of lawyers and economic consultants who stand to gain from an activist policy, regardless of the outcome for the rest of us.
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