Outside of millennials who came of age in the '90s and investors who endured the dot-com bubble, not many people remember Netscape. Launched in 1994, the pioneering web browser predated Chrome, Firefox and Safari. At its peak, it dominated 90% of the browser market. Netscape lost most of its browser market share to Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer during the browser wars, and AOL ultimately discontinued Netscape browser development and support in 2008.
Today, company co-founder Marc Andreessen is perhaps more widely recognized for writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why Software Is Eating the World.” His argument was that software was beginning to take over major industries around the globe, citing examples like Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPE) “jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software,” and Google’s plans to buy Motorola Mobility.
