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Andreessen Interview Discusses Post-Crash Innovation
kevcol writes "The SF Chronicle has an interview with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, talking about innovation after the dot-bomb crash, how AOL doesn't understand its own customers, his reaction to some comments by Larry Ellison, who believes that 'innovation primarily comes from big companies like Oracle', and Andreessen's post-Netscape experience as head of OpsWare (formerly LoudCloud)."
But does Andresson have anything useful to say about the thousands left unemployed by the dot-bomb debacle, or the devastating effect it had on silly-con valley? And do his well-respected insights acknowledge the sad fact that American computer companies gladly replaced American tech workers with foreignors in order to save literally only a few thousand dollars on taxes? Does he have anything to say about the evils of corporate greed or the neglect of human need that have long characterized the American economy?
'innovation primarily comes from big companies like Oracle'
Even your company was once an "innovative startup."
Do you like German cars?
He's still Netscape's co-founder. I mean, you wouldn't call Michelangelo the former sculptor of David just because he's not still chiseling away. He didn't go back in time and un-found it or anything. :)
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
The real innovation happens at companies populated with nineteen year olds. At nineteen years old, you don't have the kind of doubts you'd have at thirty. You don't have a hundred people in middle management telling you what you can't do. You don't have people trying to tell you that you're crazy for having a brand new idea, and you don't have a marketing department that swears up and down that the focus groups thought your product was crap. That's why true innovation starts in people's garages, with leaps of faith that can't be made in a big company. It's true that big companies are best at improving already existing technology, but the newest, most revolutionary concepts come from the brain of ostracized teenagers who just don't know when to quit.
The entire, long interview only mentions the word Linux once, and none of it takes place in the context of open source -- it's like something out of a 1999 BusinessWeek, when Linux/OSS was considered a joke and a non-factor.
It seems as if he's just pitting small businesses -- 19 year old wonder kid startups that often fail and caused the dot-com crash-- against brick and mortar computer companies, and COMPLETELY giving the cold shoulder to the open source and free software movement that's currently making all the difference and leading the way in innovation in the computing world.
Either this guy feels threatened by the free software revolution of the 21st century, or is still stuck in the past.
Marc Andreessen is a person that makes me think. Was he one of the losers of the .com revolution (Netscape died a cruel death at the hands of AOL) or was he one of the winners (his browser returning to its roots as an Open Source Mozilla and slowly but very surely starting an open source revolution). View it how you will...
I say this as an evil Microsoft developer who just loaded the latest Debian package on his system. To quote Magneto in XMen2 "It has begun...."
...in bed
well, i hope he means the browser since he knows jack all about the economy. witness from the article:
Do you want to put up a tariff, do you want the price of Chinese goods to rise? You're taxing your own citizens, and you're paying more for the things you buy at Wal-Mart. Why would you do that?
apparently andreesen thinks economics stopped with david ricardo.
the reason you want to put up a trade barrier with china is because they compete on price by breaking the international rules: child labour, forced labour, unsafe working conditions, bad envirionmental track record. you name it. if "free trade" is going to work (a long shot) then there have to be baseline standards about what constitutes fair manufacturing practices - otherwise the "winner" in the global economy is the country most willing to exploit its citizens, fuck its environment and provide substandard or unsafre products.
bah!
2 1337 4 u!
I do seem to recall them making a profoundly dumb move once or twice, but the details are hazy at best.
I think the details went along the lines of "We'll buy Peoplesoft to corner the CRM market. Then we'll drive the company into the ground and leave all their customers with no choice but to buy Oracle software." Don't know if those are the exact words, but Oracle's CEO has come out to say things pretty close to that. Sorry, but evil is evil.
As for innovation only being done by big companies, I do believe Apple started out in a garage. And wasn't eBay started in a basement. Innovation is done by people with a need, or by people who see a need and want to fill it. It's not done by corporations with a desire for more money. Innovation costs money without a guarenteed return on investment. For a business, that's a risk too big for most to take.
One of the problems big companies tend to have with innovation is not that they don't have ideas. It's just they're so big that the next innovative idea -- if it's not equally huge -- isn't going to move the needle on their financials.
... and therefore the careers of decision-makers in those business units, who tend have a lot of say into the direction of the company and so are likely to fight resource allocation to such threats being developed from within the company. They may have to buy them in later, but that's how most big companies innovate these days, they buy up small companies.
And if it is a truly revolutionary innovation, it will destroy the business of the units of the company the currently make all of the company's money
I've finally got around to changing my sig
No, that would be the loser, because they would end up with angry citizens, poisoned resources, and a reputation for producing shoddy goods.
The winner would be the country with well-off people who saved a few bucks on each pair of jeans.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The funniest thing is it isn't to corner the CRM market, it's to become the number 2 CRM vendor and make it essentiall a three horse race (SAP, Oracle, Siebel) with salesforce.com and a couple others as dark horses. That's why it's so insane the Ellison would drain all the capital out of Oracle to buy Peoplesoft, it just gains them a bit of marketshare and a customer list that will lose almost half it's value as soon as he gets it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
then get your butt in wearable computing.
This is the next direction for the real innovations in computing. The UI needs to be designed, more research needs to be made, and new designs need to be investigated.
university of Toronto, MIT, U of Georgia. these are the three hotbeds of wearable computing right now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Basement/garage Electronics inventor Also has the abilities/tools available..
Yup, and it has always been this way. Gateway, Dell, and HP all got their start as a couple of guys building computers in barns/garages/sheds.
I agree that individuals have tremendous amounts of knowledge and equipment available to them at a very low cost, yet the one man show still doesn't have every resource a larger development/research team would. The one man show is missing one key resource: time.
One person can't possible explore as much as a 5 man R&D team can. A well equipped R&D team researching the same idea a one man show is researching is bound to do better due to the amount of collaboration etc (Assuming the five people are equally skilled as individuals when compared to the one person). There ARE diminishing returns on development projects when you add more developers. There is a sweet spot, and anything more than that gets you less and less. However, that five man team has more raw man hours than the lone hobbiest, which can make a huge difference in the net results.
I do feel there is significant room for innovation from one guy with a great idea and the grit to see it through to the end, but it is always important to remember that the big company has money/time that one individual may not possess. Hopefully technology can equalize this gap, but it will take time for technology to do this.
Jeremy
I think the details went along the lines of "We'll buy Peoplesoft to corner the CRM market. Then we'll drive the company into the ground and leave all their customers with no choice but to buy Oracle software." Don't know if those are the exact words, but Oracle's CEO has come out to say things pretty close to that. Sorry, but evil is evil.
Don't we always get mad at people for doing black box innovation? At least Larry Ellison knows what he wants, and takes initiative to make it happen, and tells us what he is up to. If I had a billion dollars I too would buy out the competition. Thats business, it makes the world go around. The competition doesn't have to bend over to the buyout, just as you can make a replacement for peoplesoft. Act! is a crappy version of peoplesoft when you get down to it, why can't symantec make it better and market it to peoplesoft customers who got burned? If Cisco bought out Linksys, and then replaced all the boxes on the shelves with 8 port Catalyst switches and a 500$ pricetag, and cut off all the old support contracts as they expired (pretend your 5 port dsl router had onsite tech support), you can bet some other company (dsl routers and switches inc.) would step up and produce a competing product. Sucks to be you, but you can just go purchase the competitions product.
I mean, don't get me wrong - he seems like a nice enough guy and I wish him well and all that. He had an undeniably good contribution with Mosaic. However, after that, he has always struck me as someone who was in way over his head. I remember reading somewhere while he was VP of Engineering at either Netscape or Loudcloud, that the main advice he gave other entrepreneurs was to "never compete with Microsoft". What kind of advice is that? I never saw how his programming contributions ever qualified him to be VP of Engineering at any company, and I've never heard him say anything particularly insightful in countless interviews he seems to keep getting to this day.
Supporting their software on Linux also benefits the OS community. Oracle is a 1 point of contact for any problems on the support linux platforms. Thats a HUGE deal for companies considering moving to Linux. No matter what the problem is on a linux server Oracle will support you.
As for actual code here's a quote from an article:
Officials at the OracleWorld conference here last week said Oracle will continue to contribute development work and code in areas such as management, clustering and enterprise database to the open-source and Linux community in association with companies such as Red Hat and SuSE Linux A.G.
Full article here.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
"innovation" is corp-speak and indeed does come primarily from large stolid entities. True invention -"going a little beynd the realm of the 'possible'.." to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke is cecessarily the province of individuals or at most very small groups (even if those individuals or small groups happen to be associated with large organizations!)
In summary: the necessary (if not sufficient) condition for true progress beyond the 'known' is the existance of gifted Individuals.
Innovation comes mosty from geeks who have time and equipment to play with. In computing, equipment generally means just a computer so you can have lots of innovation from anywhere. With other things it means labs and expensive toys and some time and freedom to play - usually at universities or corporate labs.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Oh come on, Marc: it's really only like that in the summer, when the wind's out of the south! In the winter the wind comes howling off the prairie bringing the odiferous delights of burnt soybean oil from the Kraft plant.
He's also right about the brainpower around this place. Awesome.
Loren Heal, lheal at uiuc
sigs, as if you care.
what do they care. their customers aren't the type of customers that give a shit about $50k for an oracle production install. their customers do buy the name and the support. so someone else can take a tool and extend it so that postgresql has a nicer admin tool. i don't see that eating much away from oracles cash register. they're in a different league.
.. sybase or MS Sql Server. i guess those are other "large" players. who cares. it's giving to opensource. and giving has to be a give with no strings attached.
maybe someone could take that oracle tool and make it usefull by
look at the eclipse platform from IBM. they give it away. sure, they sell some derivitive of it as WSAD, but they give away the base model. other companies (myeclipseide.com) also sell derivitives of it. that's supporting the opensource community. (IBM anyway. maybe myeclipseide gives something in terms of opensource, who knows).
Let's have a pre meeting to discuss the meeting to go over the format for the covers for the TPS report we will prepare to justify the expenses of planning the research necessary to prepare to study the effects... etc...
The corporate research world (in which I have had the dubious pleasure of working) spends 4 weeks planning and meeting for every one spent actually working... the 5:1 ratio of the team to the individual is quickly lost there... and then the passionate inventor will willingly work 18 hour days. Try getting a researcher to do that... or the company to allow it.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
And this is a charitable description of his contributions. I have heard much more scathing indictments of his level of contribution.
Its also worth noting that his company was completely crushed in every incarnation (browser firm, server firm, suite enabler, services) that it entered. The man is no Jack Welch. He is very loud though, and somewhat arrogant...interestingly though he would not even rate on a Silicon Valley top 100 wealth list....or 200, or maybe even 300.
He likes to brag about the stocks he has shorted - but fails to mention Yahoo as one of them (at exactly the wrong time).
Interesting that all the responses thus far seem to support the idea of conservatism setting in. With all due respect, 'Get a dregree' and 'Get into what the colleges are doing' are exactly the problem she is espousing. The young pre college crowd has not been trained (some might say brainwashed) to accept marketing and outside ideas as gospel truths.
Infamous young gentleman, Thomas Alva Edison, was inventing without a degree, or a marketing/college firm guidance. Many many open source programmers are doing similarly. The degree of creativity displayed by the mostly young no worries no inhibitions crowd is where I place my bet. They have historically been the ones with the greatest inventions, and the most spectacular failures.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
In the software world, a 13 year old in his basement with a old P-III 500 and linux has the same tools available to him as the entire microsfot corperation does.
Erm, not exactly. Microsoft has huge resources available in terms of testing and coding and stuff. A 13-year-old with linux doesn't have those things. He does have a lot of great tools, and he's certainly in a good position to "innovate", but he still can't match Microsoft or any other large corporation for resources. One important thing he's missing is the ability to determine if his "innovation" is going to make money. Large corporations have millions (billions?) of dollars to spend on market research to determine if their innovation will sell.
The Basement/garage Electronics inventor Also has the abilities/tools available.. I can solder BGA chips to the home made 4 layer circuit boards I can make (have a board house do it for you for $100.00 is much easier though) A large number of chip makers gladly dole out single or a 3 pack of samples to small companies or hobbiests.
Can you make a processor? More importantly, can you make one that will be "innovative" compared to current bleeding-edge processor technology? For any other electronics project, the issues will be the same. How much do your failures cost you in time and money? How much time and money do you have to spend? For every Jobs and the others that existed in the '80s (the Amiga was designed by a team in their garage as well) there were hundreds of failed garage computers. Even after you've built your innovative piece of electronics, whatever it is, it takes money to manufacture it, and even more to market it. Jobs and Gates and all those guys had a HUGE advantage in their market that we don't have now: there were no PCs. Home computers didn't really exist. As much as I hate to admit it, Jobs and Gates (and Commodore, but they're not around anymore for anybody to remember their significant contributions) made computers available for home users.
Right now the single person has the same capabilities available to them that the largest companies in the world do. Hell we have the "rock-star programmer" building a fricking rocket to launch himself into space.
The first statement is just plain wrong. :) Total up your net worth and then compare it to IBMs net worth and then tell me a single person has the same capabilities as the "largest companies in the world". Your "rock-star programmer" building his X-prize contender just happens also to have a significant personal fortune to put into the project. Can you build a rocket that costs a million dollars? Do you have the resources to do all the R&D required to build a rocket? Check out the Armadillo pages to see the failures they have. Can you even afford to have one of their failures?
Yes, individuals can and will innovate. They will also continue to get rich doing so. But that's not the same as having the same resources available that a large corporation has. It's still David and Goliath no matter how you slice it.
Like what I said? You might like my music
I could quote Churchill or the U.S> Constitution w.r.t. spelling...
Yes, please do. Please point out spelling mistakes made by Sir Winston or the Framers. Of course, I'm sure someone else will gladly point out that American standard and British standard English have different spelling conventions, so what you think are spelling mistakes are probably actually correct. Also remember that American standard English wasn't formalized until after the Revolution, so presumed spelling mistakes in the Constitution are probably also correct.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't bother reading the second linked article because the first was so bad, I assumed the second would just be more of the same. That's what happens when you post something with no credibility, it directly impacts totally unrelated items just because they happen to be referenced together. This is why professional editors are so careful about fact checking and spelling errors: one bad article can tarnish an entire organization (witness the recent problems the NY Times has had because of one bad journalist faking datelines).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Done a lot better moneywise? They sold their teetering company for twenty billion dollars! Imagine that number, try to hold it in your head: twenty billion dollars. It's hard to see any way a browser company could have done any better than that.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I agree with you that there are lots of good arguments against free trade. But you have to remember that there's another huge advantage to free trade that no one talks about: peace. One of the benefits of the Marshall Plan, the EEC, and all that was that [Western] European economies were integrated by trade, and this made war between them untenable--their economies would collapse the moment the shooting started, because trade would be cut off. For all their tensions, the US will not go to war with China, because our economies are increasingly interdependent. Free trade is not just about economics; it's about creating a world in which war is unthinkable. That does not automatically make free trade good; as you pointed out, it has many issues. But for all the real evils of Wal-Mart in China, consider the security both countries enjoy from each other, and the secondary savings like not spending as much money on defense.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Actually, if you use "innovation" in the new-age business lingo of those hipster PR suit bearers, then it may actually be correct. These days it apparently counts as innovation if your software puts the menu choices in a different order than the previous version.
Innovation used to actually mean something a few years ago. *sigh*
The details of the story don't matter and boil down to he said-she said. However, these facts are on the public record:
1. Marc Andreesen did not invent either the Web or the browser. Mosaic was based on the idea and codes of others. Nor was he a programmer. Nor did he have a significant management role at Netscape.
2. Despite Andreesen's admiration of the Google founders creating something of value and long-lasting, he and Jim Clark did not do the same. Netscape was one big air-bubble, the beginning of the madness which left a few people very rich and many others quite poor. Nothing of Netscape remains, and if it is remembered at all, it will be as an icon of greed, stupidity and arrogance (the three main characteristics of the dot-com entrepeneurs).
3. Ironically, and most gratifyingly, Mozilla, which arose from the ashes of Netscape was a project that returned to the original roots of the Web - the idea of sharing as a mechanism to expand human knowledge. Precisely because it is based on these positive values, Mozilla will be around for a long, long time and create long term value and real innovation.
So I agree with the poster. Why should we care about Andreesen's opinions? He was at the right place at the right time - but that doesn't make him wise, not has he learned from his experiences. Read what he has to say about browsersand innovation:
"There's nothing emerging right now. Creativity stopped in 1997. Before that, there were huge numbers of changes: dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java mail, plug-ins for security and other functions. And these were created by Netscape and many others."
Just because he's rich doesn't make him any less of a pompous fool. Jim Clark was the business brains of Netscape, by the way, so don't give Andreesen any credit for that.
The only guy I even knew with a NeXT (Turbo Slab) ran Mosaic on it for a web browser. I don't know if that helps you any, but it is a nice anecdotal data point.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All I propose is that there be a tariff based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights. If people lack the freedom to form unions, then a tariff of a certain percentage be applied to items entering this (or any Western) country. Same thing with reasonable environmental laws -- tariffs get collected on the polluters.
Money is the only thing that business does, or should, understand. It is not the perogative of business to provide human rights. Business is a-moral. So if they treat their people like dirt, they should have a profit incentive, provided by their customers, to not do so.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman