Last night (9/30-10/1) at midnight, Mr. Bill's Browser 4.0 was released.
Late last night, between midnight and 1:30, somebody (MS? probably)
dumped a huge IE logo on Netscape's front lawn (a metal shell,
apparently, deep enough to stand up on its own). They probably expected
that we wouldn't notice until morning, and wouldn't be able to get
equipment to move it until 11:00 or so, and some press cameras would come
by in the meantime; we wouldn't be able to bring legal action, 'cause we
wouldn't have any proof, and we'd just look whiny.
Well. Needless to say, MS was dumb: they forgot that we're *here* at
midnight! Somebody spotted it, and, rather than waste effort trying to
get rid of the logo, they decided to slap MS in the face with it instead.
(Figuratively. :-) They gathered people to help, and they tipped over the
IE logo so that it was lying on its back, spraypainted "Netscape Now" on
the side facing the street...and then carried over our 7-foot-tall statue
of Mozilla (Netscape's Godzillaoid mascot) and stood it up on top of the
IE logo.
So now we have Mozilla standing on top of the defeated IE (with his thumb
up and a grin on his face), and people are wandering by and taking
pictures; it got covered in by local papers and TV, and I've been told
Reuters picked it up. Not the sort of thing we'd publicize on purpose,
'cause it is a little childish...but they started it! :-)
-- A Netscape employee
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