Netscape Browser is Officially Dead

Wow! According to the official Netscape Blog their support of Netscape is over. The end of an era (kind of). Back when the WWW was just being formed the browser to have was Netscape. Microsoft was late to the game with Internet Explorer and it took them a while to ramp up the IE product where it was decent enough to compete with Netscape. IE was free and there were all sorts of complaints of anti-competitive Microsoft practices. Fast forward to today.... IE is a great browser (I know we could argue that point all day, but its used by the majority of users today) and FireFox has been taking some customers from IE over the last year or two. So why did FireFox take off while Netscape went down the tubes? I don't know for sure, but it seems to me that when AOL bought Netscape they didn't work the brand as they should have and it simply died on the vine.

The Netscape name lives on for the time being on the Netscape Portal, but thats about it. I think Netscape will fade away and most people will never even notice.

Shockley Honda - Rant

Every time I drive by this store or hear it mentioned I'm reminded of an experience I had with them when trying to buy a car many years ago. Many years ago I'd done business with Shockley Volkswagen and was always happy with the service. They sold the Volkswagen part out to Fitzgerald so they're not in business anymore. But Shockley Honda is still in business and doing well from what I can tell. I don't know how they do so well considering the experience I had with their sales people. I won't even consider buying a car from them, and in fact I won't buy a Honda at all because of them. I know Honda is one of the best cars on the road and my thinking is not rational, but that's just the way it is for me. Sorry.

The experience was that my wife (girl friend then) went out to Shockley Honda looking for a new car. We told the sale guy that we were definitely going to buy a new car, just not today because we didn't bring our check book (to make a deposit). He told us to "come back when you have your check book." Can you believe that? He didn't even want to talk to us. We left and bought a car at another dealer less than a week later. Now Shockley Honda has one less customer for life.

I've been told by people in the business that selling cars has more to do with the long term relationship than the present sale. When a customer walks in the door you don't think about this one car they're buying, you're considering all the other cars this guy will buy in his lifetime. Guess Shockley Honda didn't understand that when they hired this sales guru.

Update on Open Office

I've had OO loaded for about a month and its working great. I suggest anyone who needs an office suite should look into this program. Its amazing and its free. I have a legal copy of Office 2007 (that I got for free from MS) but I uninstalled it and installed OO. What does that tell you? It tells you that I wouldn't use MS Office 2007 even if you gave it to me! ;) Seriously though, 'm not trying to bash MS here. MS Office is a great and powerful product but it uses a lot of system resources, but the UI changed and made it difficult for me to use. It has way more features than what I need (and probably more than most people need). OO is a great alternative and I'm telling you that it is a great product. I am recommending it to everyone I know.