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21
If you like to go horror movies, you know the cast usually sports a character you’ve come to think of as The Idiot Who Deserves to Die. He’s the knucklehead who runs screaming into the path of Godzilla just as the giant reptile is heading out to spend a relaxing afternoon destroying Tokyo, and gets squashed like a bug. The dimwit who sticks his noggin out of the deserted cabin in the woods and yells out “Mad slasher? What mad slasher?” just before the mad slasher decapitates him. The space-bound fumble-fingers who always manages to drop his blaster right when the Tentacle of Doom is zeroing in on him as lunch.
If Marc Andreessen, cofounder of one-time wonder company Netscape, ever gives up high tech for a career in horror movies, he’ll play that character.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen, a computer science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, posted the first version of the Mosaic browser for download on several Internet sites. Mosaic was primarily the joint creation of Andreessen, who functioned as the product architect and idea guy, and Eric Bina, a programmer at the university who did most of the actual coding. Mosaic represented a radical step forward in browser design. It had, for the time, an easy-to-use graphical interface that a newcomer to the Internet could master in about an hour. It used HTML to display both text and pictures within the browser environment. Versions of it were available for UNIX, Windows, and the Mac. Mosaic, which would serve as the spiritual foundation of Netscape Corporation, swept through the Internet like a virus, only with a happier outcome. By the end of 1995, millions of copies of the product were in use, and to the general public the World Wide Web was the Internet.
In the interim, Andreessen, deprived of what he felt was his proper share of the glory for Mosaic’s creation, headed out west to make his fortune as a generation of high-tech expatriates had done before him. He quickly fell in with Jim Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and the two founded Netscape. The company promptly wrote a new browser that was eventually entitled Navigator to avoid legal problems with the University of Illinois, which owned the rights to Mosaic. Netscape’s new baby was released over the Internet in December 1994.
Far more functional and feature packed than its competitors, including its Mosaic predecessor, Navigator quickly became the de facto market standard and by 1995 had approximately 80 percent of the browser market share. Netscape went public in the summer of 1995 (2 weeks before the rollout of Windows 95). The stock, pegged at a pre-IPO value of $28.00 per share, opened at $71.00 and closed at $58.25. Overnight, Netscape was a media sensation and Andreessen, its vice president of technology, became one of the industry’s latest on-paper multimillion-aires. Even better, Andreessen also found himself at the tender age of 25 playing the role of spokesman and poster boy for the Internet company at a time when all anyone could talk about was the Internet.
It was a disaster.
The New Bill, Not the Same As the Old
On the face of it, it could have all worked out. Andreessen is a big, soft-looking fellow with stocky blonde good looks. Yes, he was young, but Bill Gates was still drinking Shirley Temples when he founded Microsoft and he was only 26 when he negotiated the famous IBM deal. Andreessen is fairly literate and very intelligent. He looks good in pictures and is comfortable on camera. People naturally warm to him and he has a good speaking voice. On the face of it, a nice PR package. Unfortunately, what was missing from the package in the mid-1990s was even an ounce of common sense.
Once he’d gotten a taste of the limelight, Andreessen, along with the rest of Netscape, promptly decided that very smartest thing they could do was to bait and threaten Microsoft. Andreessen began his big push to guarantee his company’s destruction at the hands of Microsoft by taking an early look at Java in 1995 and telling the world that this new language, in conjunction with Netscape’s browsers, was the application platform of the future and would replace Windows. This immediately got Bill Gates’s full attention. Windows is Microsoft’s most valuable franchise and what threatens it threatens the company. Not one to let an opportunity slip by, Andreessen proceeded to ensure Gates would stay fully focused on him and Netscape for the foreseeable future by allowing himself to be quoted in the trade press predicting that Windows would be reduced to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers.”
After his immortal “device drivers” bon mot, Andreessen was hardly through. Over the next few months he proved to be an endless source of witty and memorable observations, all of which were widely reported on in the press and collected by Microsoft, the owner of those poorly debugged device drivers. Some of his most pithy comments included the following:
“It was like a visit to Don Corleone. I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.”
“We’re gonna smoke ‘em.” (Microsoft being the intended smokee.)
“No horse head in the bed yet.”
“Those idiots up in Redmond.”
“The beast from Redmond.”
“They can’t keep up.” (Referring to Microsoft’s inability to out-code the tyros from Netscape.)
“The Evil Empire.”
“Godzilla.”
Andreessen also discovered that, like Bill Gates, he had an affinity for the camera. In a 2-year period he appeared in or was profiled by every major news and business magazine. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine seated on a golden throne. George Gilder, prophet of everything high tech, pronounced Andreessen earth’s most supercalifragilisticexpealidotious person. A Forbes article proclaimed Andreessen was the “next Bill Gates.”
Merry Pranksters
Inspired in part by Netscape’s irrepressible vice president of technology, AOL, another fierce Microsoft competitor, embarked on a path of merry pranksterism. The company flew a blimp over the rollout of Windows 95 with the word “Welcome” emblazoned on its side. (This stunt had a shining precedent: Steve Jobs’s condescending 1981 newspaper ads “welcoming” IBM to the microcomputer industry. Today, Apple and Netscape [now owned by AOL] each hold about 4 percent shares in their respective markets. As Marx noted, history does repeat itself.) All the while Netscape was indulging itself in displays of high spirits, the company was developing a reputation of being just as arrogant and hard to deal with as Microsoft.
Meanwhile, back in Redmond, Washington, the real Bill Gates, not the simulacrum from Netscape, paid Andreessen the very highest compliment of all. He took him seriously and dedicated all his time and energy to destroying Andreessen’s company. The Netscape cofounder personally earned celebrity dartboard status at Microsoft, an honor that had previously been reserved for such luminaries as Philippe Kahn of Borland. By 1998 it was all over, as shrinking revenues and market share forced Netscape to trade high-tech heaven and independence for the low-tech haven of AOL and subordination.
It’s impossible to overestimate the rank stupidity Andreessen demonstrated in his choice of public words and attitude vis-à-vis Microsoft. He’d committed the strategic equivalent of walking into the cage of a hungry tiger, turning around, taping a sirloin steak to his butt, and executing a slow bump and grind. It should have come as no surprise that when he left the cage he had no ass.
The harsh truth is that Netscape wasn’t in a position to go head-to-head with Microsoft on anything in 1995. After its IPO, Netscape had $203 million in the bank; Microsoft had $10 billion. Netscape’s core products, browsers, weren’t hard to build and Microsoft had the resources to build them. Nor, despite Andreessen’s boasts, was Netscape a stronger development organization than Microsoft; in fact, the reverse was true. As already noted, by version 3.0 of IE, Microsoft was winning the product review battles in the press.
The release in 1997 of Netscape Communicator, designed to be an IE killer, drove the point home. Communicator quickly developed a widespread reputation for being slow, flaky, and overloaded with features such as an e-mail manager that never really worked. Netscape’s server-based programs were also regarded as second-rate efforts, and many of the products the company claimed to have under development were vaporware. Java as a replacement for Windows proved to be a fantasy. Nor was Netscape smart enough to develop or acquire a robust Web design tool à la FrontPage, one of the few places in the Internet bubble where real and sustainable profits could have been made.
Netscape, of course, faced an incredibly difficult challenge. Its initial strong success with Navigator and highly visible IPO guaranteed the company would attract Microsoft’s attention. The intelligent thing for Netscape to have done during the period when Microsoft was considering what to do about the Internet would have been to immediately sew Marc Andreessen’s lips shut and be as meek and unassuming as possible. Company executives should have publicly fainted when anyone suggested that Netscape technology would ever replace Windows as an applications platform. Netscape should have pledged eternal fealty to Windows, offered to partner with Microsoft (with the full understanding that Microsoft would eventually turn on them), and bought enough time for the company to cement its third-party relationships, make money, and build a more unassailable market position. In point of fact, Netscape did try to do this as the full weight of Microsoft’s marketing panzers bore down on it, but after Andreessen’s series of trenchant observations, Microsoft wasn’t buying. What Netscape needed to survive the inevitable Microsoft onslaught was to buy as much time as possible, but the moments allotted by circumstances of its own making turned out to be not enough.
After the sellout to AOL, Marc Andreessen found his role in the industry had changed from young Internet über-man to personal geek assistant to Steve Case. After realizing his career at AOL was going to consist mainly of teaching members of the executive staff how to program their VCRs, he left to form a new Internet services and infrastructure company called Loudcloud. In view of Andreessen’s previous performance at Netscape, it was perhaps an unfortunate choice of name. The company finally changed it to Opsware.
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