Just reviewing my blog Stats on Google Analytics and saw these stats for the last month:

I remember when I started to play around with doing website development over 14 years ago and at the time Netscape had massive market share.  In fact they had so much market share I used to code the sites specifically for Netscape and put some code in to catch all the Internet Explorer users and pass them to a warning page (now wasn’t that customer friendly behavior .

As you can see Netscape isn’t anywhere on the landscape of people who have stumbled across my blog.

Got me to thinking of what other software leaders have disappeared over this time.

Back then I was involved in delivering Accounting Software and was witnessing the death of products such as Chairman and Masterpiece, and the emergence of SAP, Peoplesoft and Oracle.  Interestingly JD Edwards is one of the few that made it through the transition (before they were swallowed by Oracle of course).

Then came the wave of Purchasing software (Ariba etc) and CRM software (Siebel).  Again all gone or swallowed by the big boys.

Next came BI Software, Business Objects, Cognos, Proclarity, Essbase, Hyperion.  Again all swallowed, but the brands survive (for now).

I had already witnessed the rise and fall of Lotus 123 and whatever the word equivalent was (must be getting old can’t remember its name, just remember it had a blue background and white text by default!).

And of course through all this SAS has survived, amazing for a privately owned company, but then again that’s probably the reason it has.

I wonder what the next 10 years will bring?