What Happened to Netcaster?

cotcomsol asks: "I was surfing around a few days ago and ran across a bunch of old hype for Communicator 4, specifically the Netcaster component. I played with it a bit when it was in beta, and haven't heard anything since. Anyone know why they dropped it? "

Marimba

[JavaDuke]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the netcaster technology was based on Marimba's Castanet.

Castanet looked very promising for a time, but for some reason got burried and became an extremely overpriced technology. It would have been great if Marimba didn't want an arm and a leg and a first born child and your entire estate and ...

I suspect netcaster disappearing may have had something to do with Castanet going south as well. But then netcaster to me seemed very buggy

A victim of the cold war

[Pauly]

Remember when this was THE defining issue in the 4.0 broswer wars? In a bit of genius, Microsoft steered the press into making the "Channels" versus "Netcaster" the primary comparison between these two products.

Netscape fell for it and got distracted from maintaining the strengths that IE lagged behind on.

Ever notice that "Channels" are nary in sight in IE5? Unless you're an ESPN-addicted salesman, it's not likely you've done anything with either of these features except to find out how to end their annoying, bandwidth- sucking ways.

What happenened to Netcaster? It served it's purpose just like the carrot on the stick.

Re:Marimba

[einstein]

some companies are using Marimba Castanet...
I do Tech Support to one of the larges tax preparers in the country, and for the 2000 tax year we are using castanet to send sales information to world headquarters. I'm very foggy on the details, becuase the company doesn't like to let their lowly Tech support staff no more about the software then they absolutely need to.

but to sum up that rambling, Castanet is still alive...if barely

Re:Marimba

[JavaDuke]

I don't doubt that it is alive, but to use it you need to have mega bucks. Not like using a web broswer and server.

When Castanet first came out, I could forsee it being used in a similar vain as the WWW, if not anywhere as extensively, but at least more so than it is now.

It still is a dream of mine, I'd love to see an open source java version of Castanet...

(still dreaming...)

Re:Marimba

[jsparkes]

I added castanet support to our applet about
a year and a half ago. It didn't take much work.
Nobody ever used it, wanted it, or even asked about it. Sure looks like a dead end to me,