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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 about to open some fuckin' windows.
I think that he'll face huge hurdles, especially with the two main competitors. If he can target a certain niche and build up just like Firefox then he might be succesful. Hopefully it doesn't become another netscape.
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)
morphing from technical whiz kid into serious businessman -- the kind who delegates authority, makes sales calls in suits and dabbles in philanthropy.
fuckin' sellout. If all you're doing is taking calls and delegating, you ain't doin shit. You're just a check-cashing oxygen thief.
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
He has *another* company? What the hell happened to his last company, LoudCloud?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
And now good old Marc is a "visionary". Whoopdedo.
I really have no respect from anyone at Netscape, with the possible exception of jzw. If they were in business today they'd be as bad as Microsoft is accused to be, and then some.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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?
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 |
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
.. 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.