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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.
is he no longer a co-founder?
Actually building a secure server - now that would be innovation.
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.
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!
This is the same guy who gave movie advice
here??
Right?
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.
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
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.
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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 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.
Mr Andreessen, welcome back. We missed you.
(I'm so sorry)