<story><title>Eazel, ex-Apple led Linux startup</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmountain</author><text>I remember the hype when Nautilus first came out. I was a teenager, but even then, I had my doubts as to how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business. IIRC there were conversations about how to monetize it using premium add-ons which seemed pretty ridiculous at the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>horsawlarway</author><text>So extra context that may help at least understand the perspective:&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;i&gt;considerable&lt;/i&gt; amount of overlap between the browser and the file manager originally.  The notion of the modern day internet wasn&amp;#x27;t really here, and instead a lot of companies saw &amp;quot;browsing the web&amp;quot; as mostly equivalent to &amp;quot;browsing your files - but remotely&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Even Microsoft did this - &amp;quot;Windows Explorer&amp;quot; (The file manager) and &amp;quot;Internet Explorer&amp;quot; (The browser) shared a huge amount of code.  To that point that I could still write COM browser helper objects that run in both of those programs as late as 2018 - only stopping when MS finally killed IE in favor of Edge-Chromium.&lt;p&gt;Basically - Back then the web was just files to be browsed, and that was the job of the file manager, and people correctly identified that the web had monetization opportunities. They were just bad at identifying exactly what they were.</text></comment>
<story><title>Eazel, ex-Apple led Linux startup</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmountain</author><text>I remember the hype when Nautilus first came out. I was a teenager, but even then, I had my doubts as to how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business. IIRC there were conversations about how to monetize it using premium add-ons which seemed pretty ridiculous at the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mepian</author><text>&amp;gt;how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business&lt;p&gt;Well, there are Total Commander and other commercial file managers: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Comparison_of_file_managers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Comparison_of_file_managers&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>