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Andreesen "Grows Up"
inah writes "The original poster boy for the old .com economy and how he's currently doing.
"The poster-child who grew up" from The Economist."
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The difference of evolution of the visual apperance Browser and the Creator (the former from sleak to bulky, the latter from round-faced to lean) explains pretty much the difference in perspectives. Netscape's doomed, and Mark is well off.
I think it's interesting to see the stock prices for Loudcloud since their IPO compared to Netscape's... I'm interested to see how Loudcloud will fare in this new economy.
Well, due to all the childish garbage that seems to occur in nearly every thread throughout /. these days, I've turned to other reading. The economist, (despite...or because of), being from Outside the US, seems to have great indepth stories regarding worldwide topics. Although, unfortunately, our news seems to be of overpowering interest...particularly Bush's debacles.
Yes he has grown up. You'd have thought that he would have kept some of his youthful ideals. But alas, he, like everyone, has to "join the real world" (read suck up to everyone who can somehow get you $$). Wearing a suit isn't the end of the world (heck he even looks good in it). But it is sure telling that the "internet revolution", is over, instead becoming just another corporate jostling match for supremacy. While it strives for legitimacy, let's hope that those with Marc's vision can keep some of the wonder alive.
What was our posterboy doing in 1991? That's right, posting to alt.sex about his fave porn films.
Don't believe me?
You should.
Something has annoyed me in the last couple of days about LoudCloud, but I can't remember what it was.
At least I found one thing they have in common with Netscape, besides Andreesen here.
They should have a good market, and it would be nice to see them succeed though.
I like music
"What was once the province of geeks is now ruled by suits."
Slashdot ruled by suits... imagine that!
'Nuff said
Link slashdotted. oh well.
He blamed MS for netscape's failure. Now who exactly will he blame for LoudCloud's failure? Perhaps one day he'll realise that he should blame himself.
The closing paragraph of the article reads:
This is clearly the kind of thing that the editors and readers of The Economist would like to believe about the Internet: The show is over, nothing more to see, move along everyone, move along. Too bad it is total tripe...
Andreeson and LoudCloud are a real business now, true. And their revenue model is well designed and might actually work. But the Internet isn't about to turn into a buttondown, suit ruled, geeks don't make the rules anymore thing anytime soon. That is what happens to mature markets and, while the first gold-rush is over, the Internet is far from a mature market. There is still lots of room for someone with ideas to make a difference. What is less likely is that those ideas are worth twenty million in VC money.
I'm afraid the suits are in store for a hard awakening if they think differently.
Jack William Bell- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
"Another decision, made early on, was that the new firm should not compete with Microsoft. "
It is really nice of mr Andersen (i know its misspelled) to think that he can choose not to compete with Microsoft, but that is not how things work.
He was not trying to compete with microsoft when he made netscape either.
Ultimately microsoft decides whether you compete with them or not.
So i think he should have said. "another desicision, made early on was to pray that microsoft doesnt come in and destroy our bussiness again".
be sure to visit this NYTimes forum to witness how father willian's evile deceptive paid2post ?pr? bots MiSlead J. Public, all day, every day, for 5 years now. IT's the least you can do.
Hehe, good one.
At least it wasn't GAY PORN.
Do you detect the condescension toward 'geeks'? It's typical of biz articles to blame the dot com debacle on tech workers. In particular biz journalists like to blame the young founders of these companies, as if their lack of seriousness and business experience caused the dot com crash. Like "yes we 'suits' knew it all along." Tech people built these (crappy) companies but brokerage houses and greedy investors (all of us) pumped up the price bubble. So many people lost so much money not because of naive college CS students. It was because of bad advice and stock hype from wall street institutions. It would be interesting to see how many billions in profits the institutions made off of average investors. They got in right at the beginning of IPOs, rode them up, and sold for 100%, 200%, 700% profit. We held the stocks at those high valuations and watched them fall to earth.
"These days he wears a smart suit, rather than a denim shirt and jeans. He is a manager, not a keyboard jockey. He last wrote a line of code, he says, in 1994. The super-fast Mercedes and an impractical military vehicle that previously belonged to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood star, are gone; he now drives a low-key sport-utility vehicle instead.
"
Any body else find this passage depressing? Its not that he has grown up as much as he has been assimilated made to conform.
Now he wears the suit and drives the SUV. A low key SUV, mind you (there is so much irony about an SUV being low key).
In a related matter isnt it hilarious that the Economist has to explain that Arnold is a Hollywood star. Not that any reader wouldnt know who arnold is but they would love to pretend they dont.
What? He's sorry he tried to rip off Mosaic and commercialize a public domain effort and got out foxed by a company much better at doing that?
Ok, apology accepted.
-pyrrho
but there were fortunes to be made at the "back-end" selling services
maybe the author of the article saw the same post.
The article "Imposter Boy", is worth a read. This is the ONLY article I've ever seen from the perspective of the non-Netscape people of how all that Mosaic/Netscape got started. http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html ALL the other articles I've ever seen are from either Netscape's or Andreesen's perspective, perpetuating the myth of what really happened in the beginning. I've seen a lot of people comment on this article before, and I'll tell you most of the comments are "sour grapes, sour grapes". Well, just look at what the article says about people that worked at Netscape.
You ever get into a position of some power, and some jackass starts digging up crap from your early days. It doesn't matter, he wouldn't find anything 'naughty', because we know you, like all of us, are perfect. It's irrelevant whether one posts on slashdot, jacks off to porn, or whether he or she posts to alt.sex.fluffy-toys.barney in his or her free time. That's personal. Don't let personal interfere with professional. Perfect example that most slashdotters should be familiar with now: Nash. I could go around saying:
What was our posterboy doing in 1963? That's right, hanging around gay bars looking to satisfy his fetishes.
Who cares? The man's a genius. Let him do with his frickin' free time as he wishes. Not all succesful people have to be bereft of life, humor, or recklessness. Not all successful people are perfect. Some are. . . guess what, they're boring.
impractical military vehicle that previously belonged to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood star, are gone;
Schwarz...en...eg... Oh--a hollywood star! Funny, never heard of him...
c-hack.com |
The only reason why Netscape failed is b/c MS abused its monopoly power to crush it. Integrating IE into Windows when competitors can't do that for lack of knowledge about Windows gave MS an unfair advantage in the browser market, because their browsers inherently load faster than other equally-poorly coded browsers (actually, part of IE is ALWAYS loaded in Win9x, as that's what the file browser is).
And contrary to what this idiot in the Economist says, "growing up" for the internet does not mean conforming to the previous business regime and becoming nothing more than TV on speed, nothing more than a huge space for corporatization.
Contrarily, the internet is growing up as it realizes its full potential -- more and more user-interaction: more "grass roots" power. As time progresses, the ratio of non-corporate:corporate web-sites will become larger, as: (1) The number of people in this world is increasing faster than the number of corporations; (2) Many people have interest in creating sites or putting information online (not only via web-sites, but via P2P); (2) The bandwidth and computing power becoming available to consumers is increasing. P2P and file-sharing technologies represent a sign of maturity for the internet.
But really, using the word "maturity" in reference to the internet is nonsense. The internet is flexible, and new uses for it will be found continually. There is no "goal" for what the internet should become. It will simply evolve, step by step, web-site by website, idea by idea.
I feel very sorry for anyone who's mind is so small, who's imagination is so bleak, that (s)he can only think of the internet as ultimately useful as an avenue of corporatization and commercialization.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
When did the Internet become "ruled by suits?"
Was there a memo about this?
Goodbye Neo, hello Mr. Andreesen
Another decision, made early on, was that the new firm should not compete with Microsoft. "Everybody should be in a business once in their lives that competes with Microsoft, just for the experience," says Mr Andreessen.
An industry joke tells of the chief financial officer of a software firm who calls down to the loading bay on the last day of the quarter to ask how many units have shipped. "Too early to say," comes the reply. "It's lunchtime, so we're only halfway through the quarter."
Ha! HA HA HA! HA! Ha ha ha hahahahahaha! That's so funny! If only EVERYONE was that funny.
The book "Silicon Boys" has a good account of the whole netscape thing. According to the book(I'm not saying it's true), Andreesen started acting like an asshole to the engineers who worked with him on the orginal Mozilla.
"Poster boy" was the epithet bestowed on him in the blurb at the top of the story, but having said that, it's all a bit irrelevant, because my comment did come across as implying he should be judged in light of all his facets, not just business ones.
:-) Thanks for the pedantry, though :-)
I should shut up and go code something useful
Having sat across the table from Mr. Andreessen in a couple of meetings, I have to say that the man is less than impressive. He comes off as an empty-headed suit, a trophy for his sales staff to parade in front of clients.
(Background: LoudCloud was attempting to take over my former employer's web operations; not just make a pitch for services, but actively -- and with much hostility on the part of their sales team -- denigrate the infrastructure we had built in our own data center and convince upper management that we were being negligent in our work. We ended up fighting them off by showing that they would have had to lose money on us for several years in order to provide us equivalent services for less cost. They pressed on for months, fueled by our CEO's irrational desire to have Andreessen as a personal friend. The highlight of my career there was the day we canceled our letter of intention with LoudCloud.)
At a meeting in which his local and regional salesmen were in a shouting match with us (my favorite comment from their regional sales director: "You'll never be able to keep up with your little shareware schemes!" -- this was in response to our use of Apache/mod_perl), Mr. Andreessen sat there, first looking at us all as if we were speaking in a language he didn't understand. When talk turned to leasing schedules and other evidence against LoudCloud's value proposition, he became bored and began checking email on his RIM. Eventually he went and made a phone call at the other end of the room, and then sat down away from us so he could fill out his forms for a Federal security clearance (after the meeting I had to show him where our FAX machine was so he could get it in under deadline).
That's how he behaves in meetings with potential clients -- clients that his staff spend insane amounts of money and energy to woo, and bring him in to impress the savages. When we finally ceased talks with LoudCloud, he was very petulant and sent our CEO a near-illiterate email message about how disappointed he was that we had chosen not to contract their services. I understand the CEO still tries to woo him on occasion, despite.
He may very well be the richest (or luckiest) media darling I've ever shaken hands with. I am pretty certain he's also the most shallow.
I have heard often that he is a mere figurehead, but if what you say is true he is not even good at being that.
While much is made of the inevitable haggling that takes place at the quarter's end (when customers know they have software companies in a tough spot), this article glosses over the difficulties inherent in running a services business, particularly one like Loudcloud.
A software company has terrific gross margins: as we know, software costs almost nothing to reproduce and distribute once it's developed. Sure, the costs of developing it can be high (in a commerical setting), but each additional product costs virtually nothing to stamp onto a CD (or make available on a server for download). The basic point is that the inherently high margins in software provide a great cushion of potential profit, and one can grow a business to vast proportions with little additional development effort (but with some sales effort). Selling a product to one person or 1x10^6 people takes little additional development effort, in theory.
In a services business, however, each additional customer requires expensive infrastructure and personnel to develop. Whereas software has high fixed costs and low variable costs, services businesses (like IT consulting, lawyers, etc.) tend to have high variable costs (mostly labor) and low fixed costs (rent, etc.). The problem comes when you try to grow these businesses to tremendous scale. It is extraordinarily expensive to hire, train, and retain talented people, especially in IT.
For a place like Accenture (or a tiny 4-person consulting firm), the people are the assets--growing the business means growing the employee base, period. This is a fine model, and tends to have low fixed costs, but the profit margins tend to be lower than in packaged software. That said, people-based services businesses don't depend on expensive equipment with which to perform the service.
In Loudcloud's case, you have the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, you need racks and racks of expensive servers, storage, etc. with which to provide the service. On the other hand, you need extremely expensive people to manage all of these complicated setups. You have the high fixed costs of a product-style business, and the high variable costs of a "bodyshop" type business. In addition, you typically don't have proprietary offerings--one can buy managed hosting from a many companies, large and small. Loudcloud tries to address this in two ways, namely by developing "Opsware" (to lower the number of people required to run the business and to give it a pseudo-proprietary edge) and by (presumably) purchasing new equipment as it adds new customers.
From a profitability perspective, though, Andreesen is wrong--packaged software is, as an industry, one of the highest-margin businesses going (both gross and net), while services (esp computer services) tend to have lower margins and lower profitability.
Besides, there are lots of ways to deal with the "end-of-quarter" haggling. You think Nike and Ford don't haggle on the price of services that are provided to them?
quick recap: netscape started giving away their browser (face it: if you let people download it and use it for free, and hope they'll pay, you're giving it away), then M$ used their might to drive them out of business by a) giveing away their browser and b) packaging it with (to various extents) their OS. why download browser N when browser M came with the system?
remember, it's difficult to compete with someone who illegally abuses their monopoly power. antitrust laws are what keep mcdonalds from giving away food for 6 months to drive burger king out of business. M$ was found to have violated those laws. it's always difficult to beat someone who's not playing by the rules.
I am going to share this with some pals. We'll all have a nice laugh, but not for the reason you're probably thinking.
Mosaic didn't meet the Free Software definition, let alone any definition of 'public domain'. Get your facts right.
This article in the Economist is a heap of paternalistic claptrap. I usually respect most of the thinking that comes out of the Economist even if I don't agree with it, enough that I'm a paid subscriber. But the implication of this article is that the dotcom era was a childish tangent and that the technology industry has now grown up and realized how the real world works is a gross oversimplication at best, and more likely just hogwash. The technology industry has not reverted to the domain of the "suits" as the article implies. True, many of the internet revolutionaries have donned ties and pantsuits and risen through the ranks into executive management. Even Phil Zimmerman sold his soul to NAI. But there has been a fundamantal change in how the technology business world works.
.NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet. Napster and its progeny have likewise insured the irrelevance of the existing recording industry giants (and the death of their ethically clouded business model). A little upstart company (Verisign) that issues virtual identity credentials bought a company that issues virtual addresses (Network Solutions), and has become the megalith that we should all be terrified by. And IBM, recognizing that there's good money to be made in services rather than only ownership of intellectual property, has hybridized itself through such things as Linux, and become much stronger for it.
To wit: You don't judge the severity of a climate change by seeing how well the oldest and fattest animals are. Many of the dead dotcoms were old-school organizations that took on new names and attempted to shovel their wares onto the internet, only to fail miserably. Although Microsoft gained a lot from the dotcom era, it's worth noting that Microsoft was the domain of "suits" from shortly after its inception. Gates himself railed against open code as far back as anyone can remember, insisted that the Internet was irrelevant to the software market, and has only recently noted that security in network-connected applications is of some importance. Microsoft stock has essentially plateaued -- it's been bouncing around $50-70 for about two years, and dividends are not paid to shareholders. The days of MSFT stock splits leading to the purchase of a new house are over. Microsoft may be a reliable internal moneymaker for some time to come, but it's no longer a realistic investment growth vehicle. Likewise the traditional model technology product business have suffered -- the computer hardware industry has become a lean area, squeezing the life out of traditional middle markets (and driving it online). Traditional old-school service organizations (KPMG and the like) have laid off tens of thousands.
On the other hand, new types of businesses are having an interesting go, and there's been a *lot* of irreversable change. Who'da thunk that Redhat could actually reach profitability? Proprietary networking protocols are dead. Sendmail has been commercialized. Apple has adopted an open-source core, and is now the world's most prolific UNIX software company. Major movies are being rendered with open-source code on clustered commodity computers. More women than ever are finding paths to executive status and power through the technology sector. The center of innovation in browser code is coming from Mozilla, with code more stable than either IE or Netscape on Windows. Java/J2EE has finished
The dotcom world has grown up and joined the old world? I don't think so. Surely anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute can see the clear differentiation between dotcom-era companies that had good ideas such as Palm, and the multitudes of con artists whose shell corporation names are enumerated on the likes of fuckedcompany.com. What's happened is that the dotcom survivors (the ones who actually had ideas and value) have learned to adapt in ways that position them for survival (accepting small but dependable margins), and surprising dominance in others. Some are successfully selling things that are openly available. Others are successfully selling services where the old-school said there was no need or opportunity. The curious thing is that the old-school property sellers (software, music) are being slowly killed by the new-school service/access sellers, and the old-school service sellers are being slowly killed by the new-school open-source/property sellers who find smaller margins attractive. Only in the White House and the oil industry have we returned to the glory days of the 80's and early 90's (and after people look at the balance sheets, the next election will take care of that).
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
I don't find it depressing at all. Why do you ask?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i don't think its belong to him!!
Netscape was cheated by Mircosoft, but that's not why they failed. AOL crushed netscape, the question is, why?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
i thought this take on Andreesen was interesting, to say the least. It's a nice try to take a former "poster boy" and attempt to use his personal changes to analyse an industry. It seems like capital B Business has, for years, had this immense need to pull coders and representations of coders away from the maverick whiz kid over to the "smart suit" wearing, conforming manager. Re-reading the article with this in mind, doesn't the crowing seem sinister?
But i think this is ultimately a weak ploy - Andreesen no longer represents programmers - hasn't written a line since 1994? That's gotta suck! The only reason i choose to accept money for code is that i love writing code! You just won't get me in a management position, and i never enjoyed the sweeter benefits of the boom as Andreesen did.
But seriously, how long until the conforming hyphae of capital B Business change the industry i love? Require me to wear a suit to work, even if i never meet with clients? Require me to pass a MSCE and "piracy ethics" test to get my programming & compilation license? Require me to turn my music down? Isn't this the ultimate fruit of the DMCA and all *CAs? so how long?
You simply can't compete against that in the business world. When your competitor is not only playing with a stacked deck but also doesn't care about winning for its own sake, then you have a real problem. As tough as things may be for companies like Quicken, it's just not impossible in that same sense. Besides which, Quicken established themselves very early on, before Microsoft became quite the behemoth that they are today. Try getting the financial community behind you for a novel product/service in ANY business that Microsoft takes seriously -- no matter how good your idea and your positioning is, it's just not going to happen.
I dunno. Gates, Ellison, McNeely.....they all wear suits. And I don't think you could credibly make the case that they're the kind of people that have to wear suits to get by. They seem to genuinely like them. Not everyone wants to look like Matchbox 20 when they go to work, and its not because they don't have anything extra to offer. You however seem to be in abundance of inflated self-worth and arrogance. Ever consider donating some to those low in self-esttem? :)
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Yes it was his posting. The guy was a kid on the net back then, he wasn't worried about some future database cataloging all of his usenet postings to embarass him ten years later. Besides, he's probably not embarassed today either.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
it was funny ;-)
In short for companies to survive on the 'new internet' they need to get rid of all the workers and hire more 'grown up' managers.
Of course going from programmer to suit is a proactive step towards successful business, instead of a past tense result of business fuckups and swapping passion for quick money.
The business world is way fucked up compared to the 'success' world. Once you move from one to the other, as this guy did, I don't think there is a way back. Business is not about success, business is about money.
I see that /. editing remains crude and primitive. Even one of the biggest names on the web gets misspelled here.
And grows, and grows....
--- http://foo.ca
First off, let me preface this by saying that I'm not the A.C. that you've been conversing with. That said, it's blatantly obvious to me that you have no practical work experience to know of which you speak. You're almost certainly an undergrad somewhere judging by your sophmoric discourse.
To say that you can "objectively" measure an engineer's worth any better than you can a manager's is pure fiction. You *might* be able to test for certain skills, but that's only a small fraction of the skill set required in the real world. And the product that is produced is no more objective than a manager's. Sure, you might be able to say that widget A is 20% faster, but is it really more maintainable? does that piece of code integrate well? does it have any bugs or design flaws? it's really not too different from a managers. you can look at hard things like profitability in much the same light, but that doesn't tell the complete story.
furthermore, there are a lot of managers out there and i'd say the proportion of moron managers is roughly the same as that of engineers. many managers, if by that you mean anyone that doesn't code/engineer and/or deals with the business side of things, work extremely long hours far longer than most engineers or programmers {baring the rare few marathon sessions and such).
Actually I think he is talking about running a *public* software company that sells to Fortune 500 customers. In any case, it is still an incredible business to be in and the only advantage of doing services is that Microsoft is not interested to go there.
"They lost it themselves by making a crappy browser."
There's also a little matter of Marc's taunting of MS. The team working on IE proably wouldn't have worked so hard if it wasn't for Marc's arrogance.
No mention of Marc Andreessen in NCSA's Mosaic history.
Don't forget the poliferation of english as a common language, because of the internet.
Or sticks a cigar up an intern..or doesn't inhale..
Does the coming of age of marc andressen means the end of the internet as we once knew it?According to the Economist article suits rule the internet ruse. So what do we do now grin and bear it, or cringe and fear it? Is this the end of creativity and cultural foraging?
why not? everyone needs a little GAY PORN every now and again and over and over and over. click click click. GAY PORN. gotta love it.
Microsoft promised punishment for any PC maker that threatened to prepackage Netscape on their PCs.
and if this so called intern was a male intern? muhahaha. keep your cigar. there are plently of other things...
Microsoft is nortorious as being 'the bear you don't want to bait.' That goes all the way back to the beginning of the company and before. People who knew Bill Gates as a kid have said that he is competetive all the way down to the bone. Without Netscape thumbing their nose at Microsoft, it's very unlikely MS would have moved as fast and aggressively as they did with IE.
That's the story of Marc Andreessen: he was at the right place at the right time. Think about it: he wrote a program, NCSA's mosaic, at university with some fellow programmers. He got into a fight with NCSA, left, and did it all over again with another team: building a browser. He meets a top executive from SGI, Jim Clark, who starts with him the 'Netscape' company with money from Clark. The internet takes off, Andreessen's Netscape is in the front seat and grows and grows. Why? Because the products are excellent? No, because he delivers what people wants.
Until... The re-incarnation of NCSA's mosaic: Internet Explorer takes over that front seat. Andreessen doesn't care. He sells Netscape to AOL and gets over 1billion dollars.
Was the strategy, the plan that brilliant? Or was it just luck?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I suppose we should all be watching out if some jackass digs up crap from /. /. , watch porno or go on a Jihad against Bharne.
/. if they had a job?
Personally, I think it's ok to post absolute crap on
It's your life and other people can get stuffed if they think your personal life has anything to do with your professional life.
Of course there are a lot of boring people, do you think all the linux zealots would be here on
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
The only reason Andreesen got asked to write a GUI for www was because his maths was not up to scratch and he couldn't do the job he was hired for. He was a reasonable X programmer though so his boss (Ping Phou) asked him to write a GUI for www. It wasn't his idea. Ping was happy at NCSA so, Clarke took on Marc instead.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Unless M$ put some "crash randomly or hang for 100% cpu if name = netscape" in Windows, I'd say Netscape also brought themselves down. At some point IE got a lot better while Netscape stood still around 4.x, something they're only just fixing now with Mozilla 0.9.x builds. Of course you can wonder what came first, but personally I feel it was Netscape getting behind the times...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"All flame wars eventually degenerate into compairisons with the Nazis" or something to that effect...
Hi *me* again. I'd just like to say, as a follow up, that if you care to actually disprove what I say about you, then you should be explicit about what you've actually done. What companies have you worked for? What jobs? What are YOUR qualifications? What are YOUR responsibilities? How about demonstrating that you have any real expertise in anything other than what you've been instructed in in school or heard about on forums like slashdot and from dilbert? Maybe even a link to show that you're older than ~21...
Of course, you won't comply because you can't prove what you haven't done....
This is a really great post. It reminds me why I even bother reading Slashdot these days.
Numair Faraz
Java/J2EE has finished .NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet.
.Net? Don't even bother. Clearly, Java/J2EE has finished .NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet. Silly Microsoft.
Sure. And Java is going to make Windows irrelevant. Or was that Netscape that was going to make Windows irrelevant. No, that's right, it was Linux....
Well, anyway, the day of Microsoft is over, and we all know that. These technologies make Windows irrelevant, and now that Netscape has such a huge lead, IE will never catch up. People are going to code directly to the Netscape API, with Java applets for the power stuff like word processors and spreadsheets, and MS-Windows, MS-Office, you're toast....
And
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The meept just wants you to know that this is how it ends Marc.
A couple of post on slapdown explaining how you used to post in alt.sex , and a few pointing to the story exposing the truth I helped write.
There is more to opensource than you'll ever know.
I bought you down. And I couldn't have done it without the aid of slapdown.
Messages were sent and received throught poems. I sang. You danced.
Thank god you never knew Kappa.
The birds sing, for the sun rises, and it's a brand new dawn. This is in a bird's nature.
Keep taking vitamins, and be last in line for Kappaspace. Kappaspace now rivals meeptspace. As an outcast, you will be the last to know.
I will see to it.
MEEPT!!