Rise and Fall of Big Giants (Netscape & Orkut)

Why the big market players fall from grace? Is it plain destiny, or the company chooses to veil itself in so much of vanity that it loses focus on competition? Or maybe, some other factor?

During late 90s, Netscape Navigator was considered to be the ‘real’ standard for Windows platform. As it was a united user interface to a lot of fundamental internet services (including ftp, hypertext, multimedia, etc.), its market was rapidly increasing. Moreover, it furnished quite a lot of complementary product along with its browser, while fuelling internet demand as a whole. In fact, its attractive licensing scheme ensured free-usage for non-commercial purposes. The main feature of Netscape was on-the-fly viewing of web-pages i.e. the user was not required to stare at a blank page until all the text and graphics had been loaded. These appeared bit-by-bit as the page got downloaded, so that the user could start reading the page text within moments of entering a URL. In consequence, the web got more tolerable for everyone. It also dabbled in agreements with OEM (original equipment manufacturer) companies and direct sales to large corporations.

However, it soon began feeling the heat as Microsoft initiated a full-scale attack on the browser market. It surpassed Netscape in both distribution and price factors. Microsoft bunched Internet Explorer with ISP software, Windows and new PCs acquired from OEMs. What’s more, it even gave away IE browser for free. With such an attractive pricing and ‘no installation’ requirements, it locked in a lot of new customers before they could even try out the Netscape browser.

Further, as AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, its credibility declined further. The company that was once synonymous with Web is now a mere arm of AOL’s multi-branded expansion plans. Chief engineers & executives also left the company seeing limited growth options. In order to topple Microsoft, it has now started giving away its browser and source code for free. But a huge damage has already been done by Microsoft and its now in pressure to quite likely leave the browser business and focus more on its other products including servers, e-commerce, etc. Collaboration with a larger company also seems possible.

Let’s talk about another sensation (particularly in India) i.e. Orkut. It spread almost dramatically with almost everyone’s friends and family members getting promptly addicted to it. So much so, that Orkut won “MTV Youth Icon” award for the year 2007, toppling the likes of Multimedia Cell phones, Abhishek Bachchan, etc.  The prime reasons for its popularity included user-friendliness owing to less complicated features (the simplicity that Hi5 and MySpace lacked). For most of the Indians, Orkut was the first online social networking community & a photo-sharing hub experience, with options of privacy settings (the reason why Flickr failed here). Also, as Orkut was integrated with the popular emailing service, Gmail, Yahoo email never really took off as the ‘prime’ email address for Indians. It literally made contact management totally effortless. To add, scrapping and Orkut communities became the real in-thing in India. (In fact, Orkut still has around a million active forum members).

Cut to year 2009… As it didn’t innovate itself, Orkut got more and more monotonous with very less applications (that are no way comparable with Facebook’s apps) and a constant “no donuts for you!” every now and then. Instead of scrapping, people prefer ‘tweeting’ and updating status message every hour (Facebook). i.e. real-time sharing that Orkut didn’t facilitate. Orkut also doesn’t have personal vanity URLs, even though Facebook successfully dabbled in innovations like fan page, public profile, etc. It’s only now that Orkut has realized that people are done with making tons of friends, and could do nothing more with them till Orkut adds new functionalities in its system. Orkut has a makeover now, but it might be too late for people who’ve migrated to Facebook. It has already lost a huge share in India, and is losing steadily in Brazil (its highest market), even as the rest of the world has almost totally dumped it.