NetObjects Fusion

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

~ the last words ~

Fusion was for people who wanted a website without wanting to learn anything, and I was not in that group. In the Turkish forums I was reading around 2003, donanimhaber and frmtr, the currency was markup you had typed yourself, down to the signature under your posts with your hardware list in it. If a WYSIWYG builder showed up in that world at all it was FrontPage, because FrontPage came in the Office box everyone already had. Fusion was a thing you bought on purpose.

NetObjects Inc was founded in 1995 by four people including Samir Arora and Clement Mok, who had come out of Apple and Rae Technology. Fusion 1 shipped in 1996 for Windows and Mac, and its idea was to treat a website like a print layout. You dragged elements onto a page and put them where you wanted them, and the program wrote the HTML underneath. There was also a site structure view that drew your pages as a family tree and rebuilt every navigation bar when you moved something, which was genuinely useful and which nothing else did well at the time.

The money arrived fast. In April 1997 IBM put in a hundred million dollars for a majority stake at a hundred and fifty million valuation, and the company went public on NASDAQ in 1999 raising seventy two million. The stock peaked in 2000 above forty five dollars, worth roughly one and a half billion, on about 240 employees and thirty four million dollars of annual revenue. The company claimed more than fifteen million licenses out in the world, most of them through bundling deals rather than shelf sales.

~ the record ~

~ the argument about the output ~

Every WYSIWYG tool of that era had the same reputation problem, and Fusion had it worse than most because its layout model was the most ambitious. Absolute positioning in a print layout does not map onto a document format designed to reflow, so the generated pages came out as nested tables full of spacer images, which worked in a browser and horrified anybody who opened the source.

That mattered more than it sounds. Once your site existed only inside Fusion's own project file, you could not really hand it to somebody else or edit it by hand without losing the ability to edit it in Fusion. The tool that saved you from learning HTML also made sure you could not leave.

~ what happened to the company ~

The crash did what the crash did. Revenue fell and IBM as majority shareholder approved a sale, so in 2001 the assets went to Website Pros in Jacksonville, which later became Web.com. Seven patents went to Macromedia in the same period. The product spent most of a decade being sold by a company whose actual business was selling websites as a service to small firms, which is the business that eventually made a desktop builder unnecessary.

In May 2009 a management buyout took Fusion back out of Web.com and NetObjects existed as an independent company again, with a small team shipping paid upgrades to a loyal base. Versions kept coming out for six more years.

~ the last release ~

NetObjects Fusion 2015 shipped on 24 May 2015 and there was never another one. No announcement of a discontinuation was ever made, which is how most software actually ends. Users on Windows 10 started reporting that it did not run properly and support went quiet. Eventually netobjects.com stopped resolving in DNS entirely.

By then the category was gone anyway. Anybody who in 1996 would have bought a box to make a website was, by 2015, on Squarespace or WordPress, paying monthly for a thing that hosts itself. The generated table soup was never the reason Fusion died. The reason is that the file on your hard drive stopped being where a website came from.

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