Is Anthropic the New Netscape?

In 1996, a corporate chief executive could sign a purchase order for $40-a-seat Netscape Navigator licenses, install the software across thousands of office desktops, and proudly inform the board of directors that the company was now an internet-native enterprise.It was a golden era for shrink-wrapped software. Enterprise customers routinely wrote six-figure cheques so their staff could browse the World Wide Web, while retail shoppers walked into high-street electronics stores to buy cardboard boxes containing a single floppy disk of Navigator for $39. The employees opened their browser windows, marveled briefly at static text pages indexed on AltaVista, and went straight back to running the business on physical memos, spreadsheets, and fax machines.Today, enterprise leadership is executing the exact same ritual with Claude and ChatGPT. Chief information officers buy $20-a-month subscriptions, watch staff use isolated browser tabs to rewrite polite decline emails, and declare that the…