To be fair, it wasn't the lack of search data revenue that wound up bankrupting the company -- that whole data mining industry didn't really exist outside of a couple of players and the USG. What did Netscape in was the browser revenue stream evaporating because of IE getting shipped with Windows, and the huge amount of time and people put into the Enterprise Server project that effectively got destroyed by the birth of Apache, and then double-destroyed by the birth of PHP.
Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.
Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues.
The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.”
That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.
Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.