Is the Netscape.com brand meaningless after Jason Calacanis?

PLENTY OF people, including this scribbler, opposed the destruction of the traditional Netscape.com portal by Jason Calacanis as part of his radical experiment.

We reported about his resignation last Friday, but we didn't talk much about the success -or lack thereof- of his strategy. And more importantly, what does the Calacanis Experiment mean to the brand?. A few years back, Netscape.com would have meant "an internet portal", "free webmail", "internet radio", and of course "a web browser". What does Netscape.com mean these days, 'another Digg clone'?. INQuiring minds want to know.

I am not saying that Jason's idea of creating a "Digg clone" or a "better Digg than Digg" was bad. But the way he choose to implement it was horrible, it was akin to purchasing a failing retail store and instead of slowly introducing changes, bulldozing it and then building something else completely different on the same property, and to add insult to injury, labelling it with the same brand as the previous one. Surely, the new place could attract lots of new people who had never visited the place in its previous incarnation, but it could equally well annoy and anger the faithful visitors of the previous one. Comparisons aside, this happened while other services of Netscape.com -like Web mail and Calendar which was shut down before him- were swallowed by the AIM/AOL.com portals, thus in my opinion diluting the Netscape.com brand even more.

Mr. Calacanis even seemed to publicly agree that there was a problem, and offered a "truce" to the Netscape.com users which wanted the old classic portal back, but to my knowledge, nothing came out of it, other then his original empty promise. Judging from some comments on other sites, the staff that created and maintained the old portal was probably gone by then-.

There's two sides on every story, and for the former CEO of Netscape, his tenure at the firm was a success. Web site "e-consultancy" quotes Jason Calacanis saying “I wanted to put a year into AOL and see how far I could take it. It's now exactly a year and I'm excited about how far we took everything. Netscape is growing again, WIN is now an eight figure a year business, and Blogsmith is the best piece of technology inside TW/AOL”.

However, I find it intriguing that web site traffic monitor and statistics site Alexa, an Amazon.com company, shows Netscape popularity -hits- for the last 6 months -and after a roller-coaster ride- at about the same levels today as when Jason Calacanis decided to nuke the old portal and start his social networking site using the Netscape.com brand name.

"I wanted to put a year into AOL and see how far I could take it" - Jason Calacanis

Some critics will be quick to say "I told you so". An article published back in July compared the "New Netscape" to the "new Coke" fiasco, and on it a reader concluded in a feedback post that Calacanis "has been given budget to run Netscape (into the ground) for a year and that what he'll do. He doesn't care if you like it, he's already got his. And there's will always be enough hanger-ons telling him it's great, that's he'll never pay attention to the unwashed masses that aren't Web 2.0 compliant".

So what is your take?. Did Jason Calacanis help or hurt Netscape?. Is he a true guru or did he suffer from an unrecoverable 'guru meditation' error?. Click on 'flame author' and let me know what you think.µ

See Also
NY Times: Interactive Netscape site gets some sour responses
Netscape.com "community backlash after site redesign" (July 1, 2006)
Old Netscape coots invade Jason Calacanis' Blog
AOL's Calacanis offers "truce" to outraged Netscape.com fans
Netscape webmail to be killed by AIM after Calacanis experiment
Google calendar is proof Netscape was right
AOL's Calacanis on the 're-launch of Netscape.com' as Digg clone
AOL copies Digg
New Netscape.com did not catch on, claim