[dasil003]

I tend to agree with Joel's thesis here, but the example is bad: Netscape was doomed either way, the rewrite was an act of desperation, and I'd say it succeeded because it led to Firefox which slowly clawed back those first few points of marketshare from Microsoft—enough to finally get them to resume browser development. Even assuming they could have pulled a rabbit out of their hat with the Netscape 4 codebase (which was unlikely considering the history of that codebase, and it's legacy compared to the talent and experience that was being pumped into the greenfield Internet Explorer (yes, ironic I know)), IE was still going to eat their lunch. Netscape was between a rock and a hard place. But hey, at least their code lives on today right?