11 Worst Tech Mergers and Acquisitions Ever

9. AOL and Netscape

Value: $4.20 billion

The 90s were a crazy period, when we watched movies on VHS tapes and tried our best to keep our Tamagotchis alive, among other things. As people were getting accustomed to the internet, a company called Mosaic Communications Corporation released a web browser, which quickly became the most popular, as there weren’t many alternatives. However, in the late 1990s, the browser, called Netscape Navigator, lost most of its market share to the newly released Internet Explorer. Imagine that, there was a time when there was a browser worse than Explorer. In 1999, Netscape was bought by AOL in a stock-for-stock deal, but the browser continued to lose market share, which fell to less than 1% by the end of 2006 (from 90% in the mid-90s). AOL continues to support Netscape’s browser until 2008. Even though the acquisition of Netscape flopped, the company itself had a huge impact on the development of the internet as we know it, and launched the Mozilla Organization, which later created the Firefox browser.

360b/Shutterstock.com