Salon Magazine on Andreesen's Departure and MozillaWednesday September 15th, 1999Salon Magazine's article "Goodbye, Internet poster boy" discusses Marc Andreesen's departure from AOL, and along the way the author decides to take some potshots at Mozilla. His opinions seem culled entirely from articles in the mainstream press, including CNet's article on the "competition" between Robert Ginda's IRC client for Mozilla and AOL's Instant Messenger. Cut-and-paste journalism at its finest. Why search out your own truth when there are so many versions just a Ctrl-V away? Thanks to Hervé Renault for the news. Can anyone imagine IRC competing with AOL's AIM? I just can't even dream of that happening, IRC and AIM are too different to compete with each other. Each has it's own niche. And where did the idea of this come from anyway? They've been saying Apple was dead for 15 years now.... Oh wait... this is another computer company that is dying because they're not Microsoft and people are leaving.... The names have been changed to fit the writers preconceptions.... I hate shoddy journalism. I've heard it before, too. Some places still sing Apple's death knell (the stock is the highest it's been in the 90's; what the hell is alive to them?). What I find ironic is that, in this world where it's acceptable to write articles about the deaths of companies that still fully develop, Linux is getting good press. Macs are getting bad-mouthed for being non-Microsoft, Mozilla is getting bad-mouthed for being non-Microsoft and unfinished after a year (even though it took an evolutionary release of IE 1.5 years to be released!). And yet, Linux gets good press, predominantly (C|net's constant bad-mouthing of anything non-Microsoft seems to have an exception in Linux for some reason or another, lately; Jesse Berst still praises unproven technologies and condemns proven ones, like Linux, the Mac, etc., as often as ever). It's a weird scenario. One thing that annoys me about C|Net's coverage of Linux is that they almost always include the words "upstart OS" when mentioning Linux (do a search for "upstart" on C|Net...) ! Hey, never mind the fact that there's probably about 10 million users of it by now and it's been around for, what, 8 years or so ? Yep. Given the logic in this article (Netscape shipping motherboards?) MS should be dead too given all the high level execs leaving or taking extended leaves of absence. Pieces like this only make the online media have the same level of credibility as the traditional one. Great to see the facts don't get in the way of a good story. ...Mozilla has a definite PR problem. Perhaps it would behoove AOL/Netscape (if they really care) to dedicate some resources to spin control: something that seems to have been largely missing for some time. Or maybe spin and PR are irrelevant and the end result is all that matters? mozilla has a scope problem. the reason it it considered effectively dead is because it is going to be months before it has anything resembling a usable browser. and the biggest reason for the slow going is its mistakes not only in developing instant messaging but in developing similarly non-browsing-related client software such as mail, news and editing. they should immediately halt all development activities that are not related to browsing (email, news and editor at a minimum) and get some focus on getting a high performance, standards-compliant and bug-free BROWSER into the marketplace. The editor is required for the browsing engine. They use the editor text widget to render forms in the browser with CSS capabilities, because native widgets can't handle it. Actually, the mail/news client has less open bugs, at least as far as memory leaks go, than the browser team does. Maybe they should stop all development on the browser and go for a kickass mail/news client. (FYI: I'm being facetious on that last thing.) The editor is required for the browsing engine. They use the editor text widget to render forms in the browser with CSS capabilities, because native widgets can't handle it. Actually, the mail/news client has less open bugs, at least as far as memory leaks go, than the browser team does. Maybe they should stop all development on the browser and go for a kickass mail/news client. (FYI: I'm being facetious on that last thing.) Can you imagine that I, a pioneer of Netscape is considering otheravenues because it's been ages since we have had any worthy releases of Mozilla? #14 Salon Magazine on Andreesen's Departure and Mozillby zontar Sunday September 19th, 1999 7:34 AM Gee, I was going to say the same thing about MSIE. ;-) |