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Hard Knocks, Age Transform Marc Andreessen
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Marc Andreessen, the brain behind Netscape, has spent the past several years engaged in an old-fashioned pursuit: rebuilding a traditional software company, Opsware, and trying to make it profitable, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'That he is making progress will be evident next week when the company expects to report a hefty quarterly revenue increase. In the process, he has settled down personally, morphing from technical whiz kid into serious businessman — the kind who delegates authority, makes sales calls in suits and dabbles in philanthropy. His experience helping bring Opsware back from the brink of financial disaster — in 2001, the company, then called Loudcloud Inc., staged a disappointing IPO and later had to completely overhaul its business to stay afloat — also has been formative, those who know him say.'"
I'm sure his clients on the other end of the phone are amazed by just how shiny Marc's shoes must be, if they could see them...
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
"Hopefully it doesn't become another netscape."
i cations_Corporation]Wikipedia[/url]:"Netscape had a successful IPO on August 9, 1995. The stock was to be offered at $14 per share; a last-minute decision doubled the initial offering to $28 per share; the stock's value reached $75 on the first day of trading, which was nearly a record for a stock's first-day gain. The company's revenues doubled every quarter in 1995"
Actually, I'm sure he'd like it to become another netscape; netscape was the final word in browsing back in the day (before msie was standard). The problem was it fell behind it's competitors and sort of lost focus.
References: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Commun
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
I remember when Andreesen started talking about his new Loudcloud company, and I was certain it was going to fail. It had nothing going for it that could make it any money other than Marc Andreesen's name. Now, it appears I was at least partially right, since the only way they've managed to keep from going out of business is to completely change what it is their company does. Even now, it's not really profitable, and it's trying to compete in a space already dominated by much larger companies. If this company wasn't being run by one of the biggest names in the Internet revolution, it would have run out of investors years ago.
It sort of reminds me of a company I used to work for that has continually stayed just above the edge of bankruptcy by completely changing its business model (and its name) to fit the trend of the moment. It started out as a cable company, became an ISP during the boom, then became a wireless ISP, and now it's a real estate company.
Actually, I'm sure he'd like it to become another netscape; netscape was the final word in browsing back in the day (before msie was standard). The problem was it fell behind it's competitors and sort of lost focus.
Netscape was a great business (and had a great browser) when it was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Most of the issues with the browser started after that.
No Sigs!
You dolt, RTFA! Opsware is not competing w/IE or Firefox. They don't have anything to do with the browser market!
Look up your favorite picture of Garfield. Then look up your favorite picture of Bill the Cat.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Truly, these are the times that try mens' lives...
Many of the browser problems may have become apparent after the AOL purchase, but most certainly most of them had their start in the pre-AOL days. Communicator 4 sucked rocks in comparison to what it should have been, and that was most certainly pre-AOL.
"In the process, he has settled down personally, morphing from technical whiz kid into serious businessman -- the kind who delegates authority, makes sales calls in suits and dabbles in philanthropy."
Look in the mirror Slashdotters, and see your old age.
Netscape's browser had already been soundly defeated by 1999. The bloated pig that was Netscape 4.0 (Netscape Communicator) was released in 1997, and pretty much spelled the end for Netscape's browser business. That was when the most serious issues with the browser from a technical perspective happened. By 1999, Netscape had already started the Mozilla Project, and had essentially abandoned the Netscape browser as a source of revenue.
AOL bought Netscape for so much money primarily because of its netscape.com portal site, which at the time was one of the most popular sites on the Internet.
Why, Mr. Andreessen? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than just your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Andreessen. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Andreessen. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Andreessen? Why?! Why do you persist!?
the kind who delegates authority,
Yup. That's one of the first signs.
makes sales calls in suits
That's the seventh sign, unless you're hasidic, then it's the third, although gnostics numer it fourth.
and dabbles in philanthropy.
And that's the bottom. Darth Vader gave lots of surplus Imperial cheese to orphans. Emperor Ming would write checks to the Mongo Salvation Army. And then there's Ronald McDonald House as an attempt to karmically balance the hideous doings of that evil clown. It's all just a front.
"Netscape was a great business (and had a great browser) when it was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Most of the issues with the browser started after that."
I'd already ditched it by then. The problem was that it was getting worse at a much faster rate than MSIE was at getting better. All those nasty script errors that caused pop-ups (because Netscape had no idea how to handle them). And then there was the browser being junked up by useless extras (news reader, email program, etc) that you had to plow through and do extra things in order to just browse.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Most of the issues with the browser started after that.
Really??? That's not how I remember it. I myself am aligned with Charles Ferguson's (yeah, arrogant) take on the matter...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Marc Andreessen, short of Jaron Lanier, the most overrated poseur in tech. Glory hound, marginal programmer, front man for Jim Clark, thew guy who threw away the biggest tech opprotunity since M$ sold IBM DOS. Check out this article "Imposter Boy":w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://
The fact that he gets glowing articles for wearing a suit is a true case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
This company is the former LoudCloud. They changed their name and basically became an entirely different company with an entirely different business plan, but it is still technically the same company.
He has *another* company? What the hell happened to his last company, LoudCloud?
From the fourth sentence OF THE SUMMARY: "His experience helping bring Opsware back from the brink of financial disaster -- in 2001, the company, then called Loudcloud Inc...." I'm guessing you never did do too well on those pesky reading comprehension tests...
This guy's the limit!
For an IT-company to change business model or do a lot of diffrent things such as web hosting, hardware sales and software developement might not be wrong. The market of everything computy is very changing and new comers can quickly be the best in the market. To earn money a IT company will likely do one of the following: Trick the customers to buy a bad product. Be the best thing available and still being compatible with a lot of other things AND get well known. Offer superior help and support for other companies who require it for stability of their services. Provide an overall soloution for the customers so they don't have to worry about anything. Just try to stay in many businesses to make them all survive if one of them has a rainy day. And being superior helps. This is just speculations but if you doubt what i wrote please belive the last part.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
"Darth Vader gave lots of surplus Imperial cheese to orphans"
Mmmmm. surplus imperial cheese. mmmm... That must be the reason Homer turned to the dark side. But seriously, this kind of thing is done all the time. The fascist dictator of Venezuela has given free heating fuel to a few Americans. His apologists never hesitate to point this out: "Who cares if he blames Jews for all the evil of the last 2000 years and wants Iran to have nuclear bombs and have them soon? He gave poor people GAS!"
Where were you when the voynix came?
His new company is called Ning.
Loudcloud was a managed hosting provider, that also made software that allowed servers/network devices to be monitored, deployed and controled with a small number of highly technical staff. The benefit to the customer is/was that they don't have to pay for the high priced technical staff that is needed to host their site. Loudcloud had some of the best people I have ever worked with. It was a great place to work at. Sadly, because of some mistakes, Loudcloud ended up running very low on cash and management decided to sell the hosting part of the company to EDS (which already had a hosting division).
If you have the chance to look at Opsware's newest products (NAS & SAS), you should. I recently saw a demo of the NAS product (Network Automation tool), and it is super slick. The product flat out rocks. You can manage all of your switches, firewalls, routers, and load balancers, through a very slick web interface. A very nice product.
Maybe you are not aware than Marc Andreessen worked at NCSA and invented Mosaic, upon whose layout every modern web browser is based. So basically nearly every aspect of the web interface you were looking when you posted this troll was invented by him.
Considering Mosaic was the first web browser to run on Windows, it is very much accurate to credit Marc Andreessen with setting the World Wide Web into motion and bringing it to the people. Meanwhile Microsoft missed the boat and only entered the browser market when it became very obvious that this Netscape thing was becoming very profitable and they wanted a piece. They then copied every aspect of the browser, packaged it into their operating system, thereby locking people in unknowingly, and to this day they continue to willfully 'invent new features'(read: break agreed upon standards) in order to keep other browsers out of their cheaply earned monopoly.
So. 'Visionary' turns out to be an apt label for him. Apt, I say!
Waaah, I'm the co-founder of Netscape! Waaah, everyone loves me, and I'm an icon of the dot-com industry!
Want some hard knocks? Try not working for 6+months because of the dot-com slump; try working your way back to your pre-dot-com salary from a figure less than half that once you WERE able to find a job!
stuff |
You are both right. He's the visionary that started it. However, under his management it went downhill toward the end: a terrible unusable browser that crashed all the time and was garbaged up with useless non-browser features like email client, news, and other. The friendly browser turned into a beastly bowser even before AOL took it over. It the efforts of the Mozilla team to salvage the idea.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Who else read "Oopsware" instead of "Opsware"?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yes. This is what happens when visionaries go up against beheamoth monopolies. Tech visionaries tend not to be cynical, realistic, or even all that competitive when they first try to sell their ideas. They're not therefore prepared to deal with people who play dirty and are only out to win, as Microsoft does. They naively believe that the quality and freshness of their ideas is the only thing required to take their product to the top and leave it there.
Unfortunately this often results in people taking advantage of them when they aren't equipped to look out for their own interests. Just look at Jobs(who yes, I believe, is a visionary.) They learn, though. This article is about how Andreessen has managed to acquire better business sense and become a bettetr manager and businessman because of it. It takes a while to learn things like that if you've never been to business school. But I think that theese people eventually have certain advantages - they're more open-minded, not locked in to text-book business school examples and stategies. They have a better intuition about things. They also have the advantage of learning to merge the creative side of their business with the competitive side - something that one-degree MBA students are never guaranteed to learn, as they are pressed into shape by a cookie cutter and sent out into the world to apply their studies without a clue how to generalize them and use them to stimulate creativity.
Um, I don't know what aspects of the browser you're not supposed to "copy". Did you level that accusation at Opera too?
'Visionary' turns out to be an apt label for him.
Your memory must be failing. Both Andreessen and Jim Clark essentially claimed they had pretty much "invented" the "internet" time and time again back way when Netscape was the darling of the stock market and they had zero competitors. The traditional media lapped that up as fact. I remember seeing an interview on CNN back in 93 or 94 where the slant was that the internet would not exist without their largesse.
And then they proceeded to run the company into the ground when the going got tough, proving that neither of them even qualified as decent businessmen. Netscape had the brand recognition, product capabilities and locked customer base to have knocked Microsoft out of the "market", regardless of Microsoft's dominance of the platform. People were downloading NS in droves even after the IE4 release. But their browser became so bad as Microsoft's became so good that they never had a prayer. And it was all their doing. NS3 and NS4 were, to put it mildly, pieces of crap.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
"AOL bought Netscape for so much money primarily because of its netscape.com portal site, which at the time was one of the most popular sites on the Internet."
Ironically that's because it was the default page for Netscape to open up to. Absent some action by a user to exlpicitly set it somewhere else (and where else was there) the outcoe could be nothing else.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Please enlighten us about this terrible clash. Please tell us when Microsoft began to ship IE with their operating systems. Please quote the year when NS3 and NS4 were released, and the year IE4 was released. Then ask anyone (anyone) about the quality of the Netscape browsers after version 2.0.
As a parallel exercise, you may also cite the year Microsoft started shipping a media player with their operating systems, and the number of downloads of Winamp, Sonique, MusicMatch and all the other alternative media players in the market up to and after that point.
Then we'll discuss this sad moment in history when the "visionary" was put down by the evil monopoly, as opposed to the "visionary" simply screwing everything up and then going to court to argue how said evil monopoly robbed him of his vision.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Welcome to slashdot! Bored IT nerds. Angry politics.
Yeah Communicator was a fucking hog. It aspired to be so much more than a browser and ended up suffocating under it's own fat. The Communicator 'suite' consisted of a news reader, a mail client, a web browser and a lightweight WYSIWYG html editor. While I liked the news reader (nicely threaded) the rest of it was for the birds.
Firefox at least has the wisdom to let users choose what kind of extra pork to add to the browser via the beautifully simple extensions manager. That and they keep the mail client (Thunderbird) separate. I think at it's peak, the Communciator suite weighed in at a (then hefty) 25mb download, while Firefox is still a svelte 5mb.
...hard work and actual vision of people like Tim Berners-Lee .
Uh I think you misspelt Al Gore's name
I Like Pie...
Um, I don't know what aspects of the browser you're not supposed to "copy". Did you level that accusation at Opera too?
I don't know - by not copying it?
First of all Opera came after Mosaic(1992) and Internet explorer(1995) in 1996, and by that time the standard interface was entrenched in the popular consciousness. What you are saying here again proves my point. The fact that every browser since Mosaic has used basically the same interface layout invented by Andreessen pretty much proves that no one else has been able to envision something better. Just because browser layout seems so obvious to you now doesn't mean it was obvious back then - it just means you're so used to the interface that you've taken it for granted, which is actually a testament to its novelty. Back then it was quite an impressive feat to bring an intuitive user interface and graphical browsing to such a novel idea. The fact that Andreessen caught onto the necessity of bringing the Internet to regular citizens makes him exactly what an inventor is - something who finds a solution for an apparent need or desire.
Your memory must be failing. Both Andreessen and Jim Clark essentially claimed they had pretty much "invented" the "internet" time and time again back way when Netscape was the darling of the stock market and they had zero competitors.
I think you are inventing things out of thin air.
"Pretty much essentially claimed that they had pretty much 'invented' the 'internet" is different from *actually* claiming what he did do: that you brought the world wide web from obscurity into prosperity. Andreessen definitely gives credit to others when he talks about who brought the internet to fruition, but obviously he's not going shy away from claiming his integral role in the story.
I was young at the time but I don't ever recall Andreessen claiming that he was the sole or main inventor of the internet. All I ever remember he said, rightfully, was that he played an integral part in defining the world wide web as it is today and bringing it to the masses.. In fact he's on record for crediting Al Gore for a lot of the Internet development. For instance,
Everytime someone claims that someone else mistakenly claimed that they are responsible for the internet it turns out a) to be false and b) to be serving a political agenda.
And then they proceeded to run the company into the ground when the going got tough, proving that neither of them even qualified as decent businessmen
How exactly is forming a billion dollar company and selling it to AOL at a huge profit 'running it into the ground' and proviing that you are not 'even qualified as decent businessmen?'' That's success by any standard. Netscape didn't do as well as it could have, but you seem very willing to discount everything it's helped to give you to serve some weird polemic impulse in your head.
Calm. Down. I've seen this four or five times in the past day or two - people not comprehending what I say, or just selectively reading my points to construct the weakest possible straw man.
I never said that Netscape was a perfect browser, or that Marc Andreessen didn't screw up his advantage. I just said he was a visionary. Which he was.
In fact I just conceded that he wasn't a good businessman.
Read my reply to your other rant.
Do you have a specific cite of this? That he specifically *invented* the layout and the concepts? I'd love to see it.
I don't ever recall Andreessen
The fact that you don't "recall" does not mean it's not true. Surely it's not my fault that you were young at the time.
In fact he's on record for crediting Al Gore
I don't understand how that is relevant. Please find me a specific instance where Andreessen or Clark specifically said "well, it was really the folks at CERN that invented the WWW concept, we just built a product for it". I'd love to see that too. I'll tell you what you'll find though - the Netscape boys consistently claiming credit for "the internet" in one way or another. But hey, go ahead and prove me wrong.
That's success by any standard.
By one standard at least, sure. I guess it's too much to ask for you to make a distinction between "making a lot of money" and running a successful software business that has the capability and focus to actually ship quality software that works. Andreessen and Clark just got lucky. The only difference between them and all the people who got lucky during the technology boom is that they were pretty much the first ones.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
In addition: Just because Microsoft won on features doesn't mean they also didn't steal the foundation of their browser or that they didn't do so unfairly - the thing that required the most vision was still the basic browser GUI and HTML rendering, and these are things they definitely stole. They didn't even develop the Explorer foundation themselves - they bought Spyglass Mosaic which also utilized Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic code. So yeah - everything eventually comes back to Andreessen.
Are you ready to admit the possibility that Andreessen's bad business sense and eventual laziness maybe worked in combation with Microsoft's anti-competitive streak to force Netscape to the sidelines?
No, you claimed he was a visionary who was somehow damaged by a "monopolistic behemot". Now, unless I misread what you wrote, I'd love for you to prove me wrong.
Please understand though - I'm not contesting that Andreessen's contributions are useless or unimportant. Not by far. What I do frankly find insulting is the idea that he was just a poor guy with lots of talent, incredible business acumen and generally just a fantastic dude that got "crushed" by Microsoft. That is nothing more than revisionist bull, whether you worked for the guy or not.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Given how much he sold Netscape for, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried not working for 6+ months because of the dot-com boom.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've never understood the complaint behind the bundling of Mail, News, etc. with Netscape (and subsequently the Moz Suite). I used Moz and then SeaMonkey on my ThinkPad, and when I got my new machine for school I got Firefox. I still think I like SeaMonkey more. It may be a bit more baroque, but it's a more familiar interface to me and far more comfortable. I dislike Firefox primarily because it's different from what I'm used to; YMMV.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Yes, MSHTML is really no better than the Spyglass renderer. I still don't see how this "they didn't develop it" thing maps. By your definition then Firefox is really no better than Spyglass as well? After all, all that code was also "stolen", right?
Are you ready to admit the possibility
No. Understand I'm not trying to give you a hard time here. You were the one who questioned what I said to begin with, and two posts later followed up with the "Microsoft killed Netscape" meme. If your theory of the "ant-competitive streak" were correct then it really wouldn't matter what Nescape did or didn't do, they would have been "crushed" regardless. Isn't that the very definition of "going against the evil monopoly"? The reality is much different. Netscape ceased to function as an entity capable of shipping functional software long before Microsoft got wind of how important the browser was going to be. Thus my challenge with the dates, which unless I've convinced you I'd like to see answers to.
As far as the whole antitrust thing goes, I have no problem whatsoever with Microsoft getting their arses dragged downhill because of what they tried to do with Java. But Netscape? No way. Netscape managed to kill themselves with zeal and precision. No help from Microsof there whatsoever.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion:
By 1999, most people had a clear idea that these insane dotcom stock valuations couldn't continue. But the massively inflated price AOL paid for Netscape was a high-water mark for me.
I wonder about the $4.2 billion figure, though. Was most of that in AOL stock? Were they swapping massively inflated dotcom stock for massively inflated dotcom stock, so it was really just Monopoly(tm) money after all?
The real loser was Time Warner, then, which traded shares in a valuable company for some of AOL's magic beans.
Zonk cut the original headline short- it was supposed to read:
"Hard Knocks, Age Transform Marc Andreessen into giant battle robot!"
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I worked with an old Spyglass programmer, and they were always amazed that Andreesen managed to come away with the reputation of having 'built' the first browser. He was generally a slow and sloppy coder, though his skills at self-promotion were useful in generating buzz about the product, which in the long term were far more valuable than his LOC, at least to them.
I've also had the misfortune of sitting through a couple of Loudcloud sales presentations. In one, they seemed to be delivering a canned powerpoint that was ten times more expensive that what the RFP called for. That one was in 2000, and their sales guys were a joke. They were aloof, they threw lots of buzzwords around with little implementation details, and they looked like fools. They didn't demonstrate experience in ANYTHING. They had about the same price tag as an IBM implementation but not a single example of similar success in any step of the process. It was exactly like the UPS commercial where the suits say "We're not going to build it, we're just proposing it."
In 2003 or 2004, we had a bunch of $200k proposals, and one from them was triple that, IIRC. At least that time, they didn't come off quite so arrogant, but it was remarkable that they flew across the country to pitch without properly reading the RFP.
Success indeed, if only by the most selfish measure: persoanl financial gain.
I'd give Jim Clark the credit for that aspect of it though. If Clark hadn't turned Netscape into a "business" it's pretty uncertain what would have happened with Andressen...succesful, probably. Fiendishly rich? Who knows.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
There's nothing wrong, persay, with the act of bundling, but it adds a bunch of resource-hogging bloat depending on how the bundle is configured. See any consumer level Dell fresh out of the box for an example.
not funny -- overdone and misleading tripe
why not just say in soviet russia, Tim Beneres-Lee watches YOU!
or
1. collect underpants
2. Tim Berners-Lee
3. ???
4. Profit!
see? not funny.
alacrity
Overdone/Misleading tripe?
You new here?
Yesss, I can remember screaming "fscking Nutscrape!" on many an occasion while doing TechSupport back then.
Wait, What?
It seems like he had a lot of emacs responsibility at one time. Wouldn't that have to be earned?
JWZ mentions him here.
Linuxgazette mentions his work on HTML extensions for emacs here.
This dude Andreesen was living two lives. In one, he was a computer guy for a respectable software company. You know, had a social security number, paid his taxes and helped the landlady take out her garbage. In the other, he was a black hat and was guilty of pretty well every computer crime.
Anyways, he took this blue pill and life went on as normal
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
AOL either bought Netscape out of stupidity or to get the ability to extort money out of MS. Although they ended up getting a lot of money from MS, they still didn't get enough to make a profit on the deal.
It's not that creating something like Netscape was technically difficult. It's that it was the right idea, put together properly. It takes timing, vision, persistance and a bit of luck to make anything work. What have you created that we should know about?
Myspace? Jesus give me a week I can duplicate it.
Facebook? You cannot even search the "messages" you get. Christ how hard is that?
YouTube? Uh...?
None of these sites are that amazing. They were just there at the right time and place.
uh.. whatever success Opsware has/had is in large part due to their excellent CTO/spiritual leader and the go-to guy for their customers - Tim Howes. Andreesen's name helps and he has grown a lifetime in the last five years but is not the primary reason (imho) for Opsware's success.
You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion...
First of all, I never said Netscape was worth $4.2 billion or that AOL got a great deal. I just said it was a great business at that time. Since it was bought it has been severly mismanged by AOL. $4.2 billion was an outrageous price, but that's what things were selling for at the time. It did have clear assets that would be highly profitable today if they had been managed properly.
A browser that was mostly given away for free, and was rapidly losing market share to Internet Explorer
It still had about 40% market share in 1999. Now, if they had actually updated the browser (into something like Firefox) they could pretty easily have maintained that 40%+ market share. Even Firefox has 15% market share today and that's growing very fast. No one had heard of Firefox a few years ago. They could have made money off of paid search like Opera does.
A www server that was well on its way to oblivion, courtesy of Apache
Don't forget directory server, messanging server, and application server and others. Sun bought these and is making money off of them now. If they continued to develop them, they could have been a real competitor to BEA, IBM, and Oracle. Apache is popoular, but there's still a big market for Enterprise application suites.
A popular portal site which would almost certainly decline once the browser no longer dominated the market
Interesting that you say that. Do you know where many of the top Netscape employees went after the AOL buy out? Google. Maybe that's why netcenter was never successful after the AOL purchase. Unfortunatly, AOL's big contribution to netcenter was to add popups. In this case, again, if the site was managed properly, it could have been a big asset.
By 1999, most people had a clear idea that these insane dotcom stock valuations couldn't continue. But the massively inflated price AOL paid for Netscape was a high-water mark for me.
There are countless people that claim they knew that things were over valued in 1999. Maybe you were one of the few who actually did believe that prices were inflated, but most people seemed to think the opposite.
I wonder about the $4.2 billion figure, though. Was most of that in AOL stock? Were they swapping massively inflated dotcom stock for massively inflated dotcom stock, so it was really just Monopoly(tm) money after all?
Yes, it was a stock swap. Of course, you can sell the shares if you want.
No Sigs!
your so right on that I don't have a Dell but a HP laptop and the first thing I did was reformat the Hd to jst have the OS (stage2 was to fit a bigger faster Hd and set up multibooting default is ubuntu).
Your comment just made me wonder if there was anything worth using that was bundled.
Andreessen was hardly the only one who 'invented' Mosaic:r ojects-99/internet/netscape.html
* Marc Andreessen was an undergrad when he co-wrote the first version of Mosaic, for UNIX/X Windows, with Eric Bina.
* Eric Bina co-wrote the first version.
* Aleks Totic ported Mosaic to the Macintosh.
* Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Wilson ported Mosaic to Microsoft Windows on the PC.
* Rob McCool and his brother Mike did the HTTP development.
* Chris Houck did most of the cross-platform work, but claims that in reality he "kept everyone reasonably sane with lots of late night coffee and beer runs."
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/p
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Our wonder kid grew up and is training to be a serious businessman like Mark Hurd.
Not that excellent senior managers like Hurd are dime a dozen, but guys who could invent a new industry like Marc did in the early '90s are among the rarest kinds of talent. He shouldn't have taken all those "executive MBA" classes, or whatever he did. Those are probably valuable but for someone else. He should've just continued being way out of control and made sure he found the equivalent of Clark, Barksdale, Doerr, and Bina to take care of the mundane details of running the business and implementing the crazy stuff he came up with.
Yup. The only thing worse than nutscrape was exploder. And it was much, much worse.
We conducted a PoC of their products, SAS/NAS. SAS was hard to setup, even their own SE kept cursing all the way. NAS was smooth and intuitive. Oopsware then tried to sell us some integration which was a boatload of baloney around edge use cases. Purchased NAS and looking at blade for servers.
.. does he still foment a wonderfully wilde frontier among his compatriates .. ?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
But for the ones that were there when the WWW became popular, Mosaic was synonymous with Internet, and Andreessen was the prophet.
There was HotJava, a browser developped by Sun in Java, more as a proof of concept of the language than as a real application powerhouse, and there was Amaya, the W3C browser released to test compliant HTML code.
And that was pretty much all the game in town.
You can find all this by yourself, to ask for references to what is pretty much well dcoumented history is lazy and disingeneous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.