I realize over time Netscape did quite a few things, but to me it is a company that made a web browser. They weren't a portal or an app store. Maybe if you accept that ethereum is somehow equivalent to the web...
Netscape launched a doomed portal in 1997 and relaunched in 1998 after they started losing significant browser share to IE. There were already plenty of better portals at the time (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, etc) and Netcenter's only real traffic came via Netscape Navigator users because it was the default home page.
I don't understand the comparison to Netscape either. When Netscape was in it's prime, Elph's founder was 5 years old.
Agreed, makes no sense to me either. So they want to be a first mover with the right idea, but poor execution and eventually lose out to all other competition? Sounds like a great business philosophy.