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NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen

What if Marc didn't actually program Mosaic but instead took the project along with some developers to form Mosaic/Netscape? I'm not knocking Marc's vision but to say Mosaic was created by him is a bit of a misnomer. Poor Eric Bina.

Why is it that every time this guys opens his mouth he takes a giant shit in my ear? Really, my gorge rises whenever I read a word he says.

He comes across as such a smug, egotistical phony. I can only surmise that's exactly what he is.

He's the perfect face of Silicon Valley 2003: a pudgy corporate management toad with a deluded sense of his own talent and importance musing impassively in the midst of the economic and toxic wreckage that surrounds him. Somebody GeT mE a buckET!!!

WHOOOOOAAAAARRGGGGGHHHHHH.... WHOOOOOOARGGGGHHHHHH!!...*COUGH*....WHOAAAAARRRGGG HHHHH.....

This seems to be my take on him as well, and not sure if this is creditable or not, but you can read dirt on the guy here.

He seems like a manager that tried to get invoved as much as possible, but didn't have the expertise to do or understand it all himself, but since the product was made by his employees and not one main person, he gets credit.

Whe should anyone care what Andreesen says after the truth is out, read about it here:

http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html

or is he really the great Entrepreneur:

http://www.fortunecity.com/campus/alfred/290/andre esen.htm

Very luck indeed.

The article starts off wrong, and continues on from there to just reek of "I'm not there, so nothing good could *possibly be done*".
For starters, Marc didn't co-create Mosaic.
See here
Second, Mark didn't add any innovations to web browsing himself, either.
Lastly, he wasn't the "brains behind netscape".
Nobody reported to him, except his secretary.
His only job was to run around playing poster boy for investors.

And before you get all "OOOooo, that's not what happened", you don't know, because you weren't there.

I always thought this was a really interesting article about Marc Andreessen (author of the ZDNet article, founder of Netscape, now big kahuna at Loudcloud): GQ Article

Basically, it accuses him of being a fraud... none of his ideas are/were ever his own. Take it with a grain of salt (it's written by someone who's rather bitter about Marc's success), but it is an interesting read...

capitalize on other's work!

It's the easiest way to success.

Details here.

Quote: it's not as if he needs to sit down in front of his screen and busy himself with the notoriously arduous task of hacking out a few lines of software, which, astonishingly, is something he has never done in the short but spectacular history of Netscape Communications Corporation [...] Not a single line of computer code. Never.

Actually, according to some sources he didn't write a whole lot of software. He's better at manipulating other people who write software.

He might not have been trying to compete with Microsoft, but others thought the competition would be interesting to watch.

Netscape was from the start paranoid about Microsoft, some of them even thought that Redmond might have bugged their HQ and would take you outside to dish the dirt on MSFT. Meanwhile they had made plenty of enemies, including me.

Microsoft at the time was snoozing away oblivious about the Internet. The entire focus of their company was on the launch of Windows 95 and the original MSN which was an AOL rip off. If Marc had not been mouthing off about replacing Microsoft or Microsoft had continued to ignore them as ridiculous rantings Netscape would have had time to consolidate its base before the Microsoft onslaught.

In order to prevent that I made it my business to make it impossible for the upper echelons of Microsoft to ignore Netscape.

Setting Microsoft on Netscape was a win-win situation, one of them would take the other out. Taking out Netscape was the win I was after however.

As Oscar Wilde said 'choose your enemies carefully'.

It's well documented here what Andreesen was really about.

If anybody tried to grab free software like Mosaic in this day and age and close the source like he did, the screaming would be unbearable. How the hell did he end up be so many hacker's hero? Was it the pixie dust wafting off all the Venture Capital dollars??