Andreessen on the Browser Wars

Pauly writes "In this interview, Marc Andreessen dismisses the likelihood of a renewed browser war based on the release of Mozilla 1.0. He cites Microsoft's current monopolistic market share, and dares anyone to try and fight it."

Comments

Interviewer is a dolt

[mlinksva]

Let's see, Opera is open source and Andreessen joined Netscape early. The first is totally false, the second is of secondary importance. Andreessen co-wrote Mosaic. Guess IDG reporters don't remember that. What other stupid errors can you spot?

Re:Interviewer is a dolt

[mlinksva]

IDG: How about just the idea of having an open source browser, the Opera Web browser for instance.! Is that beneficial to users or developers?

Andreessen: How much (browser) market share does Opera have?

IDG: Let's pretend Opera has a 93 percent market share. Does it make a difference that its code is open source?

Andreessen: (Pause). I don't think so. For mass market adoption (open source) is clearly not compelling yet or (Opera) would have more adoption than it does. Other things are more important. Bundling with the (operating system) is clearly more important for adoption. When you're competing against something that's both being (promoted) by a monopoly and is free, good luck competing, have fun.

Looks pretty clear to me that the interviewer thinks Opera is open source. Or he can't use pronouns. Can't really tell if Andreesseen thinks so or his comments have been damaged by rewriting.

"visionary Marc Andreessen"

[Pac]

As far as I remember, Andreessen was a competent programmer who was able to make a big buck by transfering intelectual property from an open source/freeware inniciative (Mosaic) to a privately owned enterprise more or less exactly at the right moment. All "vision" he might have had was poured upon (into?) his head by "whatwashisname", Netscape founder and first CEO.

Re:"visionary Marc Andreessen"

[msouth]

ah, but Mosaic was NOT open sourc, although the NCSA version was free to download. If it had been, we would have a totally different world today. A company called Spyglass got the rights from NCSA to the Mosaic code. Spyglass licensed it to Microsoft for (monumentally bad decision) a percentage of the sale price. Had there been a minimum in that contract, IE couldn't have been distributed free, all the Spyglass shareholders would now be retired, and who knows what else--maybe it would have prevented the bundling with the OS and we wouldn't have gotten the antitrust decision.

On the other hand, had Mosaic (probably created with mostly public money) been under an open source license, the hordes of open source hackers would have had the same starting point that MS had when they created explorer.

Anyway, I think that's how it happened.

ShareZilla

[savaget]

One way to gain market share would be for a P2P Mozilla project(Sharezilla) to be started. Good file sharing software catches on quickly.

IE troll hole

[twitter]

Verizon Guy says, IE rocks, Netscape sucks, then takes swing at Larry Ellison. Looks like flame bait to me, but that's nothing new from the Verizon Guy.

here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND.
here he tells us Lindows is second rate.
here is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice.
here we have a pure flame that was moderated well.

Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.

Re:Doesn't this sound realistic?

[Zeinfeld]

I bet browsers did run really well on your 1992 workstations, since the first graphical browser [uiuc.edu] wasn't released until late 1993

I wrote a browser in 1992.

Marc's was not the first by a long shot, it was the first browser for motif that used the motif look and feel. Before Mosaic there were browsers but they mostly looked awful.

The big innovation in Mosaic was not the images, it was the forms. Images were cute but at the time there wasn't that much bandwidth (The whole of CERN had a T1). It was adding the forms that opened up a whole new area of capability.