Netscape Communications Corp has opened a sales and marketing office to cater for its Northern Europe installed base. The division, which is headquartered in Paris, is currently staffed by three people. But Didier Benchimol, vice-president for European sales, said the European operation would expand to 25 people in the next six months following the opening of another two offices, in Scandinavia and Italy, in the next three months. Netscape said that 5% to 10% of its business came from Europe at present but that the European operations would increase this significantly. Outlining Netscape’s future product strategy, chairman and chief executive Jim Clark said the company plans to integrate Collabra Software Inc’s messaging capabilities into future versions of Netscape Navigator, and to enhance the multimedia capabilites of Navigator. Providing support for Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java programming language is one way that this can be achieved, he said. Release 2.0 will include support for Java to enable content providers to incorporate Java applets, or mini-applications written in the language, into their documents. Beta versions of Navigator 2.0 are out this week although the full release will not be ready until December. Following its sky-high valuation in the face of continued losses, Clark was asked when the company would become profitable. Netscape could show a profit right now by cutting people and increasing revenues but this would not achieve planned growth and investment levels, so we therefore intend to go for a break-even strategy, he said.
Content from our partners
