The outline you give below covers everything. However given the time limit I want to be clear on what is really important:
I don’t want a lot of guesses about Netscape generated by people who may know less than I do. I want to learn a lot of facts - most of which I don’t already know. You hit a lot of them in your full list but let me make clear which ones count:
- Personnel. Really getting their headcounts and headcount plans for different areas is very important.
- Future growth plan. Any data analyst’s have about how they will grow their revenues. People are expecting Netscape to make a lot of money. How does that pencil out?
- Geographic. Any data about sales by region and special regional strategies.
- Development methodology. This gets into staffing but would have to be put together by someone in program management or engineering. Is cross-platform a lot of work for them? Is quality a challenge for them?
- Recent speeches/interviews/analyst discussions from them about how they will beat us. Why didn’t they outbid us on Eshop/Frontpage? Why haven’t they attacked us on these distribution deals more - if AT&T was important enough for them to announce why didn’t they offer AT&T compelling reasons to work with them? Of particular interest is how they will respond to ActiveX - clone? Opendoc?
- Anything about the relationship between Netscape and Sun and Oracle would be quite valuable.
- We should make sure our goals for Internet presence are low enough that we can achieve them but also say that Netscape has lost control. As we achieve our goals people should start to question Netscapes leadership.