[FeatureRush]

The other time this story was discussed here (probably in 2011, linked to techcrunch) someone pointed out very insightful comment from person claiming to be employed at a time at the Netscape in Marketing (or Sales?). According to this employee the real reason why the web server was selling was not the regained technical supremacy, but mere fact that it was boundled with mail and directory servers that customers were actually interested in. I have no way of checking whether it's true, and there are no comments on this story today on both a16z site and techcrunch, but the idea that even someone who made the company succeed and have learned valuable lessons from it may have not seen the whole picture left a deep impression on me.

[js2]

I was at Loudcloud/Opsware from 2000 through the HP acquisition. I don't know what happened at Netscape, but at Opsware we had to improve the product.

[santoshalper]

Free mail and directory servers would not have been enough to overcome a massive performance deficit. Especially not in the 90's when web server performance was still a major issue.

[FeatureRush]

Here the source comment is reproduced in this old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156724