and now it’s gone. It was perhaps the largest blunder and waste of stockholder resources in the world of business history.
Sugar coating won’t help...... it was plain ol bad judgement.
That's way over the top. Netscape didn't make a lot of money, but it didn't lose a lot, either. It moved the industry forward. Netscape took the World Wide Web from a hypertext system into a system to spread any medium imaginable -- sound, pictures, video, VRML, Flash animation, chat, audio chat, video chat, and when a genital interface comes (ahem) available, virtual sex.
Was Philo T. Fanrsworth a failure? He died broke and without renown. All he'd done was invent the television. The Wright Brothers didn't do much; all they did was invent the airplane. When was the last time you stepped on a Wright airplane? Or, for that matter, bought an Edison light bulb or a Bell telephone? A company isn't a failure because it fails to last forever.
A lot of folks made lot of money on Netscape. A lot of folks lost money on Netscape. Buying high and selling low is not a winning strategy in any market.