NETWATCH . . . WILL THE WEB GET A MAKEOVER?

A new deal announced today among Netscape Communications, IBM and Adobe Systems could give the Internet's popular World Wide Web a sleeker, magazine-like look -- and pit the companies against theformidable Microsoft. Under the deal, Netscape will weave Adobe's Acrobat Reader, a powerful document-sharing program, into its popular Netscape web browser software. By next fall, Microsoft will turn its near-universal Microsoft Word into a web browser. While both advances would allow users to create much slicker Web pages,TIME technology editor Philip Elmer-DeWittwarns that what the two companies are really doing is fencing off parts of the World Wide Web for their own users; the only people who will be able to see pages created with the new software will be those with the new browsers.