The Final Chapter
AOL has written the final chapter on Netscape by pulling the plug on development. Netscape started the boom of the commercial Internet, got crushed by Microsoft Explorer and was eventually sold to AOL. AOl has a talent for buying worthless Internet properties. Now we await the fate of AOL itself, which has been largely irrelevant for years. When Jeff Bewkes takes over Time Warner on Jan. 1, it is widely expected he will put a bullet in AOL. The only thing we can look forward to is the language they use to describe what they are doing. I expect phrases like “advertising property, interactive portal” and other mediaspeak. With any luck, we may get a gem like the one that Terry Semel used two years ago at CES when he talked about how much his daughter used the “Wide Wide Web.”