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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)."
Whe should anyone care what Andreesen says after the truth is out, read about it here:
e esen.htm
http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html
or is he really the great Entrepreneur:
http://www.fortunecity.com/campus/alfred/290/andr
Large corporations are really the only places where you'd find enough capital to experiment with cutting edge technology. Some examples of these are Microsoft with MS Research, HP with HP Research, AT&T with Bell Labs, Xerox with PARC. These guys are doing what you want to be doing, driving the technology into the future.
While there have been significant gains in innovation that have come out of OSS, the movement largely remains a follower rather than leader of technology, choosing to re-implement already-existing technology for the sake of software freedom.
Small companies these days do not find it so easy to get financial backing for their ideas (which are usually cutting edge stuff), so the days of Yahoo!, Amazon, and other current mainstream companies who were once just gleams in their creators' eyes but grew to enormous proportions are long gone.
I have been pwned because my
While they are a 'big' company and some people distrust them based on that fact. Generally they adopt industry standards. Aren't they in our good books today? Or is that Wednesdays?
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
how AOL doesn't understand its own customers
I don't think most users wanted netscape to develop into the most buggy, bloated browser in the market!
I remember way back when netscape was actually great alternative to IE... all the geeks used it. Then they started trying to build the great palace of netscape on top of it... and it crumbled.
If they would have listened to their users, they would have stayed small... and probably done a lot better moneywise.
Now they are having to build a small browser from the beginnings up--after the money is gone.
Davak
Was Mosaic actually the first "easy-to-use" browser (as the article claims), or was it just the first popular one? Anyone here ever use WorldWideWeb on a NeXT or any other pre-Mosaic browser and care to comment?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Immediate profit motive can be an unreliable impetus for real innovation. Instead of focusing on real quality and good engineering you're sometimes forced into tie-ins, FUD, and other similar schemes to get short term results. Sometimes large organizations can do a better job with this because they have recourses to invest in the long term work it takes to do it right. If there isn't any need to push quality forward because of market conditions then you just manipulate the market (advertising, FUD, differential pricing) to sell more. The key to innovation doesn't really appear to be size as much as competition and patience.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
I worked at Netscape for 6 months back in 1994/1995. Andreessen was definitely full of himself. He's the kind of guy that thinks his shit don't stink, but it does.
Big companies like Oracle. Not like Microsoft.
Yeah, like that Fulltext search feature which allows you to quickly search a database and get relevancy ratings.
Oh wait, that was Mysql.
Pretty arrogant attitude, dude. Did you even RTFA? Here's a guess: Marc's done more in this space than *you* have. Quit sniping from the sidelines.
Innovation is heralded by big companies. Sometimes they come from smaller companies. Sometimes they come from large companies. Xerox PARC has many examples of innovation from a large company. The internet browser came from a small company, Netscape. Of course, there's those many small companies that MS absorbs to acquire their technology. Then MS displays the technology as their own creations.
Some innovation is led by a big company. Take the PC, for example. Before IBM decided to offer the PC, the market was dominated by smaller, niche players. Many companies ran mainframes at the time. When IBM began to sell the PC, it was a signal to companies that it was okay to use a PC in the business world.
In some examples, an innovation is ignored by one company and used by another. RCA sold the patent to Sony for the VCR and the rest is history. USB was developed by Intel but was not really implemented until Apple replaced their proprietary APC connections with USB.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
So you put up the trade barrier and instead of China moving along the development path to the point where their people are able to fight for better conditions you bury them so they cannot compete.
Where's the sense in keeping the poor nations down, even in markets where they are able to compete with rich nations? (agriculture, basic manufacturing, textiles)
Free trade is the best shot at raising the level for all people. You're not going to get every nation to comply with your dreams of baseline standards. Why should developing country X jump to some standard that makes their goods more expensive, when they know they'll lose their industries to country Y who ignores such standards?
Given true free trade, competition will win out. Your "winner" with the unsafe products will get driven out of the business by reputation, if not by litigation. Bought any eastern European cars in the U.S. lately??
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.
So, yeah...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
According to Alvin Toffler, in his book War and Anti-War, Germany and Britain were each others biggest trading partners when they went to war in 1914. Which is not to say that their economies didn't collapse, only that interdependence wasn't a barrier to war.
L.I am not saying people inside a corporation can not innovate or change the world. I am saying people with great idea's are not constrained by company inertia.
Look at Mosiac and Linux as examples. Both started with little financial resources. If you read the article Anderson mentions this. Lets say for example a highly profitable company like IBM came out with the next big thing. It would hardly be a blip on their radar profit wise. Big companies are too conservative.
People have great idea's. Yes getting money is hard but alot of startups started that way.
I dissagree on the next Yahoo and Amazon being dead before arrival. Look at Google? True, the next big will probably not be publically traded like in the 1990's but this is a good thing. Wall street like short minded quarter to quarter earnings and check everything to single percentage points when evaluating a company's worth. They do not like seeing R&D in their and view as only a means to stay competitive and tread water. Otherwise its a cost center.
Innovation can suceed today and not have 30 like minded competitors who are also being funded pop-up at anything related to the latest hype during the
If you read the article, Anderson mentioned this as well as how healhy it is that the Investors who can not take down's went back to Wall Street where they belong. Wall Street gives CEO's tremendous bonus's for cutting costs for so called "cost centers" like IT and R&D. Bell Labs now Lucent recently cut 90% of its R&D budget. They have done nothing innovative in years besides some limited sucess with nano technology organic counpounds for logic gates.
Name one innovative thing Oracle has done? One? Larry Elison is quite desperate. He ripped the RDMS from IBM. They tried the network computer but that failed. They are good at milking their cows which is their database. Eg. Toad, Oracle development tools, etc. But besides some trashy CRM software they have nothing. They are losing marketshare too thanks to Mysql, MS-SQL, and postgreSQL. Not everyone needs a mammothly complex RDBMS for a tiny department server or website.
The innovations I see in computing right now are blogging with sites such as livejournal.com, and audio sharing with things like Napster and Itunes. Notice like the web browser, they are not very profitable. At least not as profitable as Oracles database products, which would give the big companies little incentive to invest in R&D for these types of things.
Another reason why people, not corporations have all the good idea's.
http://saveie6.com/
While some may reply (and indeed some have) that most endeavors started by people at that age fail, such a reply in no way reduces the validity of your statement.
The bottom line is that while most such endeavors fail, there is always some chance of success, even spectacular success. When a force such as middle management stops something in its tracks, it basically reduces that chance to zero. There was a chance that the endeavor in question could succeed, but that chance was reduced to zero once it was decided to not even try.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
The high-end CRM market is a different creature. There is competition, but not enough. If Oracle isn't treating me right, I have alternatives, but I likely already gave Oracle a lot of money, and moving to another vendor's product will be expensive. I need to move all my data from one to the other (and hope it works). I would need to retrain the entire staff on the new package. Unfortunately, this 'lock-in' means CRM packages don't work as commodities.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.