Great article, but i'm not sure your criticism of Netscape / Mozilla holds water.

1. If it was a bad idea for Netscape to Get Big Fast, what should they have done? If they hadn't build up Netscape Navigator as fast as they did, one of two things would have happened. Either the Internet Revolution would have never happened or, much more likely, someone else would have Gotten Big Fast and ate Netscape's lunch.

2. Mozilla -is- releasing often. It's just that instead of calling the releases "Mozilla 1.0", "Mozilla 2.0", they call them "Mozilla Milestone 1", "Mozilla Milestone 2". They are getting tons of comments from their users, and have been for years.

You say, "You have to release early, incomplete versions -- but don't overhype them or advertise them on the Super Bowl, because they're just not that good, no matter how smart you are."

That's EXACTLY what Mozilla is doing. They don't overhype them, and that leads you to say, "What the hell is going on with Mozilla?"

-- Anonymous, July 19, 2001

Answers

Check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$47

Joels real problem with Netscape is the fact that they threw out all their existing code to start from scratch.

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2001