InSoft

» see insoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

If you installed Netscape Navigator 3.0 in 1996, you installed an internet telephone. It was called CoolTalk, it had a dial pad and a whiteboard, and almost nobody used it, because placing a call required the other person to be online at the same moment and because the line most people were online through was the telephone line itself. The software was not Netscape's. It came from a company in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania that Netscape had bought four months earlier.

InSoft was incorporated in Delaware on 4 September 1991, in the words of its own audited filing, "for the purpose of developing and marketing multiplatform collaborative multimedia software for the workstation market." That sentence means videoconferencing for Unix boxes. Daniel Harple and Richard Pizzarro had met as engineers at AMP in Harrisburg and started the company around the idea that a workstation with a camera on it was a conferencing endpoint. The first product, Communique!, shipped in 1992 and ran on workstations years before it ran on Windows.

Netscape announced the purchase on 31 January 1996 and described what it was getting in one breathless paragraph: Communique! for desktop collaboration, INTV! for distributed digital video, CoolTalk and CoolView for audio and video over the internet, OpenDVE as a cross-platform framework, GlobalConference as a telecom gateway. Six product names for a company that had existed for four years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the share count ~

The deal closed on 25 April 1996 and was accounted for as a pooling of interests, which is why no purchase price exists in the filings. Netscape issued 1,956,229 shares for all of InSoft's stock at an exchange ratio of .753808871 Netscape shares per InSoft share, and booked about $5.0 million in transaction costs. The $161 million figure that follows this deal around is a press valuation of that share block. Neither company printed a number.

~ cooltalk, briefly ~

CoolTalk had about one year inside the browser. Navigator 3.0 carried it in 1996, and when Communicator 4.0 arrived on 11 June 1997 the audio and whiteboard had been rebuilt as Netscape Conference, which Netscape's own annual report describes as an extension of the CoolTalk plug-in, now with H.323 support and a tie to the Messenger address book. Microsoft shipped NetMeeting into the same gap at the same time and for the same reason: an internet phone was something you gave away to make the browser look complete.

The honest problem was the modem. Voice over a 28.8k dial-up link was possible and sounded like it was coming from a drainpipe, and the moment you hung up the connection to make an ordinary phone call the software went offline. My own arrival on the internet was in 1998, into a household with one phone line, where the choice between being online and being reachable was made several times an evening. The product wanted a second line, and a second line was the thing the households most likely to want it did not have.

~ where the products went ~

The enterprise side of InSoft did not go into the browser at all. By 1998 insoft.com had been reduced to a single Netscape-written page announcing the acquisition and pointing visitors elsewhere: for Communique! and INTV!, it said, please visit MDL Corporation's home page. MDL, in Redmond, Washington, took over distribution and support of the Unix line, and the version of Communique! that academic pages still list in the late nineties carries MDL's address, not InSoft's.

The two halves went different ways after that. What fit inside the browser went into the browser and lasted about a year, while the workstation line that had actually paid the salaries was handed to someone else and faded out of the citation lists. Four years and seven months from incorporation to the acquisition, and two more before the website was only a forwarding note.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »