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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)."
innovation primarily comes from big companies like Oracle
Just the other day I was reading that Microsoft is readying new technology to stop web popup's in their browser - this sort of fast paced innovation is what we can expect from leaders within an industry.
Does he mean the economy or the browser?
heh
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?
is he no longer a co-founder?
'innovation primarily comes from big companies like Oracle'
Even your company was once an "innovative startup."
Do you like German cars?
Actually building a secure server - now that would be innovation.
his biography.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
The same can't be said for other area's of software.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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.
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
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
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
This is the same guy who gave movie advice
here??
Right?
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."
I found this particularly interesting
. .WSJWashingtionPostUsaToday said that apparently "All your base belong to us".
When AOL's market cap was at $170 billion, the executives added up the parent companies of the five major newspapers in the country -- the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post and USA Today.
They could have bought all five for about 10 percent of their outstanding equity at the time. And they almost did it, except for the fact that they didn't think they could get antitrust clearance. But they thought that would be a good thing to do.
Nothing like unbiased news sources owned by a gigantic conglomorate of everything evil in the world.
Tv News reporter
Today in news CEO/CTO of AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeNewYorkLATimes...commerical.
Heh. NOBODY understands AOLers.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
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
Are you a 18-years old dreaming of geek stardom?
I guess management is the only place where successive failures enhance your fame. If he were an ordinary "worker", with that record, he would be out on the streets.
All your favorite sites in one place!
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.
no, I'm a nineteen year old geek girl who wishes to god she'd started sooner. A lot of the real innovations in personal computing in the 80's came out of garages. I don't see how people can just discount that. The great inventors of the early 20th century and the great enterpreneurs of the 19th started from very little - they certainly had no huge, multi-department companies weighing them down when they had their initial Big Idea.
Come on! It crashed! Where's the core dump so we can run it through GDB and find out what went wrong?!?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
"We're doing about $8 million or so in business every quarter, so we're not very big."
I wish my employer wasn't "very big" too.
-- bearclaw
That was one of the Akamai cofounders:
Akamai Technologies, the Cambridge Internet company whose 31-year-old cofounder Daniel Lewin died when Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 11 became the first hijacked jet to slam into a World Trade Center tower, held a private service but also remembered Lewin with a tribute at its Web page.
Story
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
Innovation can come from anywhere, but it takes a big company like Oracle to make an Unbreakable product, right?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
Mr Andreessen, welcome back. We missed you.
(I'm so sorry)
I think this issue depends upon who is defining "innovation." If you define it as coming up with new ideas, history has demonstrated that almost all great innovations have been the brainchild of a single person. If you define innovation as taking someone else's early work and slapping your name on it and calling it your innovation, then yes, corporations lead the way with that brand of "innovation."
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 best brain training is now totally free : )
...how AOL doesn't understand its own customers,
That's ok. I don't unerstand AOL customers either.
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/