The closer you look, the more you see Netscape in trouble. The result was a Dutch auction, where the highest bidder would be included in the product of the online service provider. What has happened is the online companies are now taking their distribution cues from the PC manufacturers, who use their hard drives as their shelf-space. But this time the online services had the upper hand. It was ironic that exactly the companies who were predicted to suffer most from the Internet had the upper hand during the negotiations.
Nothing seems to be as it originally looked anymore.
This leads to the battle for the web. Netscape was always predicted to be the winner. It was the company which was supposed to turn the tables on Microsoft. This would be a real paradigm shift in the industry. Upside, the Red Herring, all the smart magazines were full of stories about how Micorsoft would shrink against the smartness of Netscape.