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What the Internet Was Like in 1998
It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies, Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, and Netscape is going open source.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser continued to drain users from Netscape, forcing the younger company to make a drastic move: open source its technology. "Today’s Web is slipping into a proprietary world of competing technologies, and only by understanding this dilemma at its core can those creating content come out ahead," he wrote, referencing the browser incompatibilities of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's IE. It was, said the Times in another article, “a move indicating that its aspirations extend to selling far more than books over the Internet.” The same report noted that Amazon.com had “grown to be the most successful merchant on the Internet, with 3.1 million customers.”
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