You mention a few strategic mistakes that Netscape made. Those were poor decisions. Netscape certainly went downhill when it moved from the quick and lightweight Navigator to the slow, bloated, and buggy Communicator. Shying away from standards like CSS in favor of doing their own thing was a bad idea. However, don't forget that the early versions of Netscape, which is where jwz played a much larger role, were great.
The biggest reason (by far) that Netscape faded into obscurity, though, is that Microsoft bundled IE with Windows.
More importantly, these strategic decisions about the product were not made by guys like jwz. jwz is a hacker. Like many hackers, his opinion was often at odds with the strategies of the Business People in charge.
I don't think it's fair to use these strategic missteps to discredit jwz or Joel's point about the balance between purity and pragmatism in writing code.
Comments
You mention a few strategic mistakes that Netscape made. Those were poor decisions. Netscape certainly went downhill when it moved from the quick and lightweight Navigator to the slow, bloated, and buggy Communicator. Shying away from standards like CSS in favor of doing their own thing was a bad idea. However, don't forget that the early versions of Netscape, which is where jwz played a much larger role, were great.
The biggest reason (by far) that Netscape faded into obscurity, though, is that Microsoft bundled IE with Windows.
More importantly, these strategic decisions about the product were not made by guys like jwz. jwz is a hacker. Like many hackers, his opinion was often at odds with the strategies of the Business People in charge.
I don't think it's fair to use these strategic missteps to discredit jwz or Joel's point about the balance between purity and pragmatism in writing code.