On Monday, Jeremy Liew, general manager of Netscape.com, posted a message on a jobs mailing list calling for candidates to apply to work for the organisation, which played a key role in the development of the Web but has since faded from glory.
"Netscape is aggressively hiring right now," Jeremy Liew said in the posting. "We are treating Netscape as a 'restart,' with a mandate and a budget to take Netscape in a dramatically different direction, although still focusing on its current businesses as the No. 2 Web browser and No. 3 general audience portal."
Liew said the company had multiple positions in product management, with "experience in search, browsers, consumer-facing Web sites, consumer software, authentication/personalisation, or Web publishing all valuable."
The openings are for positions in Columbus, Ohio, Liew said. An AOL representative was unable to give a current employee count for the Netscape division, partly because programmers may work on other AOL properties as well.
A source close to AOL confirmed that the message was authentic. AOL on Monday declined to give details about plans for Netscape. "Netscape is a terrific brand and there's a lot more we can do with the portal," spokesman Jim Whitney said. "But we're not prepared to discuss our plans at this time."
Netscape helped make the Internet a household name with its browser software. In 1994, the company launched Version 1.0 of Netscape Navigator, which was a commercial version of the pioneering Mosaic program.
Netscape largely owned the browser market when it went public in 1995 and was still a contender in 1998, when the Netscape browser's market share ran neck-and-neck with that of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Also in 1998, America Online said it would buy Netscape in a deal then valued at $4.3bn. Given the Internet stock boom, the transaction's value rose to $8.98bn by the time shareholders approved it.
But America Online, which later merged with Time Warner, began devoting fewer and fewer resources to the Netscape browser, and Microsoft's IE came to dominate the browser arena.
The settlement last year between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner (which has since dropped the AOL from its name) seemed to formalise the Netscape browser's demise, as Time Warner inked a seven-year contract to use IE in its flagship service.
Netscape at this point offers a discount Internet access service and serves as a portal that boasts 19 million unique users a month, Liew said in his jobs posting. Netscape also had about 18 million downloads of its browser in the last 12 months, he said.
Talkback
AOL has been off-shoring to Bangalore, India for a while. I was in Bangalore in late 2002 and I met someone from the AOL Bangalore office even then. I have a word of caution for companies thinking of off-shoring to Bangalore. It seems to me that information technology has always been about creating value through innovation and not creating value through cost cutting. I think it is a mistake to move jobs to India. Although the development costs might seem to be lower in India as wages are lower, there are also many hidden costs that should be factored in. Also, consider that the risk of the project failing is higher. In addition, one programmer in India working for one tenth of the cost does not equal one programmer working in Silicon Valley. Why? Well, partly because as soon as they can, the most highly skilled Indian workers leave the country for greener pastures ( If you have been to a developing country you would know why. ) and the common misconception is that there is an endless supply of highly skilled workers in India. This means that companies are either going to be forced to hire developers who cannot produce the goods and train them or there will soon be pressure on wages to increase in India. India has a high illiteracy rate, many people barely have functional literacy in English, and Indian University graduates are not on a par with western University graduates. Silicon Valley is a magnate and a destination for the best from all over the world. Bangalore is not. Which also raises the problem of retaining your best people in India. Although many companies are off-shoring right now, it remains to be seen if this trend will continue for the higher-skilled jobs in five years time.