AOL exits leave Netscape in doubt

The portal was a lot of people's first experience of landing on the web and will always retain a historical significance for hundreds of millions of web users who watched that icon turning and drummed fingers - "please don't let the page have large graphics" - while waiting for that 38.4 kilobit connection to do its magic.

Since then of course, Netscape has been much traduced in stature by the rise and rise of portals such as Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Netscape.com has looked a lot like an anachronism for several years but AOL has made periodic attempts to revive its fortunes with Digg-like functionality, a new user interface and much else. There is a loyal -- some would say cussed -- stub of Netscape users still out there and with new management incoming the signs might not look too good to them.

Calacanis was behind much of the Netscape.com push and his leaving is likely to accelerate yet another rethink about what Netscape was back then, is today, and whether it has any future. µ