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Following its close on the five-year anniversary of Netscape's IPO, the Nasdaq suffered through a lost decade in which it lost about of its value 5% each year. Today, it lives on only as a discount Internet service brand for dial-up users - a service every bit as obsolete as the browser it abandoned in 2008.Īfter 2000, the Nasdaq, much like Netscape, faded from prominence. By 2008, Netscape was defunct as a browser. By 2002, Netscape (via AOL) was reduced to lobbing law bombs at Microsoft, as its market share had shriveled to less than 10%. Netscape's market share peaked at 80% in 1996, and had fallen below 50% by the time AOL acquired it for $10 billion. Netscape's stock never quite regained its luster after that late-1995 peak, as Microsoft soon began to eat into Netscape's browser share with Internet Explorer. However, the fifth year was the kicker - despite a massive peak and a subsequent decline through much of 2000, the Nasdaq still increased its annualized growth rate to 30.8% for the five years following Netscape's debut, while the Dow's annualized growth rate fell to 18.5%. The Nasdaq, despite growing increasingly packed with dubiously overvalued dot-coms, didn't actually perform much better for those four years, as it grew at an annualized rate of 25.8%. The old-economy index rose a staggering 23% per year over the following four years before peaking at the start of 2000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ( ^DJI 0.00% ) and the Nasdaq Composite ( ^IXIC 0.00% ) both shot to eye-popping levels following Netscape's IPO. Netscape quickly skyrocketed to a share price of $174 at the end of 1995 before enacting a two-for-one split in early 1996. And Netscape's practice of openly sharing technology so that other programmers and their companies could build upon its ideas helped give rise to a global technology community, the open-source movement.
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Executives with old-economy experience thought they could stake a claim to start-up riches by quitting their jobs and following the example of Jim Barksdale, the former McCaw Communications chief who came in as Netscape's CEO. Its founders, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark - a baby-faced 24-year-old programmer from the Midwest and a restless middle-aged tech pioneer who badly wanted to strike gold again - inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to try to become tech millionaires. More than any other company, it set the technological, social, and financial tone of the Internet age. Netscape mesmerized investors and captured America's imagination. Netscape had yet to make a dime in profit.Ī decade later, Adam Lashinsky wrote Netscape's eulogy on CNNMoney: This meteoric rise valued the 16-month-old company at nearly $3 billion. At the opening bell, the price shot up, and by the end of August 9, Netscape closed at $58.25 after reaching as high as $74.75 during the day. Shares were offered at $28 apiece before Netscape's IPO. 9, 1995, just over a year after its founding, and only eight months after releasing the first version of its groundbreaking Web browser.
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On this day in economic and business history.