The next 60 days will make or break for Netscape Communications Corp. in its battle to keep its grip on the booming Internet market and stave off Microsoft Corp.’s bid for dominance.
Jim Barksdale, president and chief executive, told journalists in Europe that he plans to turn Netscape into a media company.
"In the next 60 days you will see us massively expanding in the media area," he said, briefing reporters Friday after a week spent in Europe meeting government officials and industry executives.
The first plank of the offensive is this week's announcement that Netscape will offer free email on the Netcenter Web site, among a series of enhancements aimed at making Netcenter the most popular gateway to the Internet within a year. The second plank is the current renegotiation of search-engine contracts with such companies as Yahoo Inc., Excite Inc., Lycos Inc. and Infoseek Corp.
"All our search-engine contracts are expiring next week. There will be an announcement in the early part of May. I cannot yet comment on how many of them we are going to continue," Barksdale said.
"So far we have mainly been a wholesaler and they were the retailer. What we are telling them now is that we want to become more of a retailer ourselves. We want to define a new type of partnership, which I think is a good deal for both."
"We've introduced so many people to Yahoo we think it is now time we started introducing people to ourselves," Barksdale said.
Barksdale mentioned Microsoft only once, to say that since Redmond made its Internet Explorer browser available free of charge, revenues on the Netscape Navigator browser had all but evaporated.
But the media offensive is timed to coincide with the pending release of Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system, which will further incorporate the Internet on the desktop and could solidify the Redmond, Washington-based software group's hold on the Net.
Netscape, based in Mountain View, California, is at the forefront of legal action against Microsoft's market position. Barksdale said comments that Netscape would be blown out of the water by Microsoft were "nonsense."
But in a sense Netscape has been blown out of the water it was the first to sail. Having lost much ground on the browser front to Microsoft, the company switched its strategy last year to focus on its server software and penetrate the business market. That move apparently hasn't produced the results the company anticipated.
Barksdale was short on details of the group's media strategy. "Everything that you see at the moment on Web sites is what we can easily do ourselves," he said. Barksdale said that for him, a media group meant a "media aggregator" -- a channel for content, but not a content provider. And he said this would take limited investments. Netscape will rely on its partners for content, he said, naming deals with big US newspapers and added-value databases.
The reason for the move was purely financial, he said.
"Look at the multiples. Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, and Lycos have a combined market value in excess of US$30 billion for revenues of some $65 million," he said.
