Q A and coding reviews ended up with Netscape was just posting new versions higher productivity and better software of Navigator on its website and you quality than software developed downloaded it. So we saw at Netscape through waterfall-ish approaches. that they would have new releases every week, or every other week. That was a TCS: So the last thing we come to is the completely different way of developing topic of building software for Internet and releasing software. In Microsoft, applications. You’ve written about this those would all be internal releases. In too, starting 20 years ago, comparing Netscape, they were public releases. how one of the early Web browser companies (Netscape) and Microsoft Microsoft came up with its own browser competed against each other in the early (Explorer), but the first couple of versions days of the Web. weren’t very good. But by version 3 Cusumano: When Netscape came to they had caught up and Netscape got market with one of the first Internet bogged down. Netscape had added all browsers (Navigator), they had basically these features around the browser and copied some of Microsoft’s practices. they were not as disciplined as Microsoft. They were doing daily builds, for So eventually the daily builds wouldn’t example. But one of the things that was work. They had around 30 million lines very different with Netscape is that they of spaghetti code; those are the phrases weren’t printing software on disks and Netscape engineers used internally. putting disks in boxes and shipping boxes to stores and that kind of thing. So Netscape did things too fast and They weren’t delivering software that they were not very disciplined at way. They also weren’t necessarily testing. We think Microsoft won the delivering software to PC manufacturers. browser wars because they actually That’s the way that Microsoft delivered had a better browser by the time you software; that slowed the cycle. got to version 3 or 4. And then, of course, Netscape sold itself to AOL, although the code lives on in Firefox.