Wake Up, Netscape: Portals Are Not An IT Priority

RICHARD KARPINSKI
October 19, 1998

"Every party has a pooper; that's what we invited you for." I doubt you've heard this wonderful sing-song phrase, but it is a favorite in my house, especially with my 5-year-old daughter, Emily.

I couldn't help think of it as Netscape executives briefed me on their plans to reinvent the Netcenter portal in an effort dubbed Customized Netcenter.

Here I was, in a back hallway of Manhattan's Javits Center, surrounded by three enthusiastic Netscapers. The two product managers, interestingly enough, were long-timers, with backgrounds in client, server and platform marketing. Now they're selling the Netcenter concept.

Then came the pitch: Customized Netcenter, a totally revolutionary plan by their reasoning, will at last make portals useful for enterprise customers.

My ears perked up a bit. We've had an ongoing debate at InternetWeek about how to cover portal mania, and in most cases, our policy has simply been to pass. Most portals target consumers and don't affect the average IT manager or corporate developer in any tangible way. If Netscape could make portals relevant for the enterprise, we just might have a reason to care about them.

The plan, one of the Netscapers said, was to let corporate enterprises, ISPs and other Web hosts build their own portals combining homemade enterprise content and applications with Netcenter-provided content (and eventually applications). Netcenter would host the pages and provide a software development kit to give IT departments control over the look and feel of the pages.

Even more intriguing were plans to "portal-enable" Netscape's enterprise products, including Web servers, directories and electronic-commerce applications.

Get it? Netcenter isn't a portal at all--it is a new network-based, virtual application development platform. Nothing an enterprise would use or build in the future would come without some link to Netcenter, which right before my eyes had become the new center of the Internet universe.

To heighten the drama, the next day, CEO James Barksdale would tie Netscape's destiny to the successful rollout of this new strategy.

Back in the hallway briefing, it made some sense, and I had to admit it had a certain elegance--as have many recent Netscape efforts to tie its Navigator and Communicator browsers, still a significant lifeline, back to the Netcenter portal.

I got the feeling, however, that my enthusiasm was coming up short. My hosts were visibly disappointed. Gartner Group loves it, they said! Forrester, too! Customers were jumping on board! The next day, a Netscape flack even flagged me down again in the show lobby to make sure I understood exactly what they were talking about.

I did. But I'm still a holdout, at least for now. Here's why:

• One word: NetCaster. Remember this Netscape push software? With help from Marimba's Castanet software and the newly born Dynamic HTML technology, NetCaster channels were supposed to be the new way for users to interact with Web content. Wired magazine, in one of its more hallucinogenic moments, declared the Web dead, replaced by push platforms like NetCaster and Microsoft's Active Channels. What happened? Push was interesting, but turned out to be a totally artificial and unwanted construct built upon something really useful, the World Wide Web. "Portal-enabled applications" feel just as artificial to me.

• When did Netscape--and Netcenter--become the hub through which the Internet runs? First came their Keyword Browsing and What's Related features, all of which drive entries made in the Navigator URL box back to Netcenter in droves. Imagine if Microsoft did this, or even something like Customized Netcenter? The cries of outrage would be deafening.

• And, of course, the billion-dollar question: Will IT care? IT managers would love to make the Web experience more useful for their employees. Corporate intranets are already becoming more sophisticated by the day. But they have bigger fish to fry, like Web-enabling their ERP systems, IP-enabling their networks and reinventing their supply chains. Or catching up on Y2K. I could be wrong, but something tells me that a new employee start page full of Netcenter content lands at the bottom of the IT to-do list.

  Who knows? Maybe I'm out of step here. I've been covering the Web since Navigator 1.0, which makes me a relative senior citizen. Maybe I've seen too much hype and spin, too many Next Big Things, and can't see when the Real Thing arrives.

  Or maybe, as Barksdale might say, this thing is a pig that won't fly. I think my daughter Emily would get a kick--and a good case of the giggles--out of that catchphrase, too.