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person to bring it alive and popularize it.

"The Mosaic browser started out in 1993 with twelve users, and I knew all twelve,"

said Andreessen. There were only about fifty Web sites at the time and they were mostly

just single Web pages. "Mosaic," he explained, "was funded by the National Science

Foundation. The money wasn't actually allocated to build Mosaic. Our specific group

was to build software that would enable scientists to use supercomputers that were

in remote locations, and to connect to them by the NSF network. So we built [the first

browsers as] software tools to enable researchers to

'browse' each other's research. I looked at it as a positive feedback loop: The more

people had the browser, the more people would want to be interconnected, and the more

incentive there would be to create content and applications and tools. Once that kind

of thing gets started, it just takes off and virtually nothing can stop it. When you

are developing it, you are not sure anyone is going to use it, but once it started

we realized that if anyone is going to use it everyone is going to use it, and the

only question then was how fast it would spread and what would be the barriers along

the way."

Indeed, everyone who tried the browser, including Barksdale, had the same initial

reaction: Wow! "Every summer, Fortune magazine had an article about the twenty-five

coolest companies around," Barksdale recalled. "That year [1994] Mosaic was one of

them. I not only had read about Clark and Andreessen but had turned to my wife and

said, 'Honey, this a great idea.' And then just a few weeks later I get this call

from the headhunter. So I went down and spoke to Doerr and Jim Clark, and I began

using the beta version of the Mosaic browser. I became more and more intrigued the

more I used it." Since the late 1980s, people had been putting up databases with

Internet access. Barksdale said that after speaking to Doerr and Clark, he went home,

gathered his three children around his computer, and asked them each to suggest a

topic he could browse the Internet for-and wowed them by coming up with something

for each of them. "That convinced me," said Barksdale. "So I called back the headhunter

and said, Tm your man.'"

Netscape's first commercial browser-which could work onan IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh,

or a Unix computer-was released in December 1994, and within a year it completely

dominated the market. You could download Netscape for free if you were in education

or a nonprofit. If you were an individual, you could evaluate the software for free

to your heart's content and buy it on disk if you wanted it. If you were a company,

you could evaluate the software for ninety days. "The underlying rationale," said

Andreessen, "was: If you can afford to pay for it, please do so. If not, use it anyway."

Why? Because all the free usage stimulated a massive growth in the network, which

was valuable to all the paying customers. It worked.

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We put up the Netscape browser, said barksdale, and people were downloading it for

three-month trials. I've never seen volume like this. For big businesses and

government it was allowing them to connect and unlock all their information, and the

point-and-click system that Marc Andreessen invented allowed mere mortals to use it,

not just scientists. And that made it a true revolution. And we said, 'This thing

will just grow and grow and grow.'"

Nothing did stop it, and that is why Netscape played another hugely important

flattening role: It helped make the Internet truly interoperable. You will recall

that in the Berlin Wall-PC-Windows phase, individuals who had e-mail and companies

that had internal e-mail could not connect very far. The first Cisco Internet router,

in fact, was built by a husband and wife at Stanford who wanted to exchange e-mail;

one was working off a mainframe and the other on a PC, and they couldn't connect.

"The corporate networks at the time were proprietary and disconnected from each

other," said Andreessen. "Each one had its own formats, data protocols, and different

ways of doing content. So there were all these islands of information out there that

were disconnected. And as the Internet emerged as a public, commercial venture, there

was a real danger that it would emerge in the same disconnected way."

Joe in the accounting department would get on his office PC and try to get the latest

sales numbers for 1995, but he couldn't do that because the sales department was on

a different system from the one accounting was using. It was as if one was speaking

German and the other French. And then Joe would say, "Get me the latest shipment

information from Goodyear on what tires they have sent us," and he would find that

Goodyear was using a different system altogether, and the dealer in Topeka was running

yet another system. Then Joe would go home and find his seventh-grader on the World

Wide Web researching a term paper, using open protocols, and looking at the holdings

of some art museum in France. And Joe would say, "This is crazy. There has to be one

totally interconnected network."

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In the years before the Internet became commercial, explained Andreessen, scientists

developed a series of "open protocols" meant to make everyone's e-mail system or

university computer network connect seamlessly with everyone else's-to ensure that

no one had some special advantage. These mathematical-based protocols, which enable

digital devices to talk to each other, were like magical pipes that, once you adopted

them for your network, made you compatible with everyone else, no matter what kind

of computer they were running. These protocols were (and still are) known by their

alphabet soup names: mainly FTP, HTTP, SSL, SMTP, POP, and TCP/IP. Together, they

form a system for transporting data around the Internet in a relatively secure manner,

no matter what network your company or household has or what computer or cell phone

or handheld device you are using. Each protocol had a different function: TCP/IP was

the basic plumbing of the Internet, or the basic railroad tracks, on which everything

else above it was built and moved around. FTP moved files; SMTP and POP moved e-mail

messages, which became standardized, so that they could be written and read on

different e-mail systems. HTML was a language that allowed even ordinary people to

author Web pages that anyone with a Web browser could display. But it was the

introduction of HTTP to move HTML documents around that gave birth to the World Wide

Web as we know it. Finally, as people began to use these Web pages for electronic

commerce, SSL was created to provide security for Web-based transactions.

As browsing and the Internet in general grew, Netscape wanted to make sure that

Microsoft, with its huge market dominance, would not be able to shift these Web

protocols from open to proprietary standards that only Microsoft's servers would be

able to handle. "Netscape helped to guarantee that these open protocols would not

be proprietary by commercializing them for the public," said Andreessen. "Netscape

came along not only with the browser but with a family of software products that

implemented all these open standards so that the scientists could communicate with

each other no matter what system they were on-a Cray supercomputer, a Macintosh, or

a PC. Netscape was able to provide a real reason for everyone to say, 'I want to be

on open standards for everything I do and for

all the systems I work on.' Once we created a way to browse the Internet, people wanted

a universal way to access what was out there. So anyone who wanted to work on open

standards went to Netscape, where we supported them, or they went to the open-source

world and got the same standards for free but unsupported, or they went to their

private vendors and said, 'I am not going to buy your proprietary stuff anymore ...

I am not going to sign up to your walled garden anymore. I am only going to stay with

you if you interconnect to the Internet with these open protocols.'"

Netscape began pushing these open standards through the sale of its browsers, and

the public responded enthusiastically. Sun started to do the same with its servers,

and Microsoft started to do the same with Windows 95, considering browsing so critical

that it famously built its own browser directly into Windows with the addition of

Internet Explorer. Each realized that the public, which suddenly could not get enough

of e-mail and browsing, wanted the Internet companies to work together and create

one interoperable network. They wanted companies to compete with each other over

different applications, that is, over what consumers could do once they were on the

Internet-not over how they got on the Internet in the first place. As a result, after

quite a few "format wars" among the big companies, by the late 1990s the Internet

computing platform became seamlessly integrated. Soon anyone was able to connect with

anyone else anywhere on any machine. It turned out that the value of compatibility

was much higher for everyone than the value of trying to maintain your own little

walled network. This integration was a huge flattener, because it enabled so many

more people to get connected with so many more other people.

There was no shortage of skeptics at the time, who said that none of this would work

because it was all too complicated, recalled Andreessen. 'Tou had to go out and get

a PC and a dial-up modem. The skeptics all said, 'It takes people a long time to change

their habits and learn a new technology.' [But] people did it very quickly, and ten

years later there were eight hundred million people on the Internet." The reason?

"People will change their habits quickly when they have a strong reason to do so,

and people have an innate urge to connect with other people,"

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said Andreessen. "And when you give people a new way to connect with other people,

they will punch through any technical barrier, they will learn new languages-people

are wired to want to connect with other people and they find it objectionable not

to be able to. That is what Netscape unlocked." As Joel Cawley, IBM's vice president

of corporate strategy, put it, "Netscape created a standard around how data would

be transported and rendered on the screen that was so simple and compelling that anyone

and everyone could innovate on top of it. It quickly scaled around the world and to

everyone from kids to corporations."

In the summer of 1995, Barksdale and his Netscape colleagues went on an old-fashioned

road show with their investment bankers from Morgan Stanley to try to entice investors

around the country to buy Netscape stock once it went public. "When we went out on

the road," said Barksdale, "Morgan Stanley said the stock could sell for as high as

$14. But after the road show got going, they were getting such demand for the stock,

they decidedto double the openingprice to $28. The last afternoon before the offering,

we were all in Maryland. It was our last stop. We had this caravan of black limousines.

We looked like some kind of Mafia group. We needed to be in touch with Morgan Stanley

[headquarters], but we were somewhere where our cell phones didn't work. So we pulled

into these two filling stations across from each other, all these black limos, to

use the phones. We called up Morgan Stanley, and they said, 'We're thinking ofbringing

it out at $31.' I said, 'No, let's keep it at $28,' because I wanted people to remember

it as a $20 stock, not a $30 stock, just in case it didn't go so well. So then the

next morning I get on the conference call and the thing opened at $71. It closed the

day at $56, exactly twice the price I set."

Netscape eventually fell victim to overwhelming (and, the courts decided,

monopolistic) competitive pressure from Microsoft. Microsoft's decision to give away

its browser, Internet Explorer, as part of its dominant Windows operating system,

combined with its ability to throw more programmers at Web browsing than Netscape,

led to the increasing slippage of Netscape's market share. In the end, Netscape was

sold for $10 billion to AOL, which never did much with it. But though Netscape may

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have been only a shooting star in commercial terms, what a star it was, and what a

trail it left.

"We were profitable almost from the start," said Barksdale. "Netscape was not a

dot-com. We did not participate in the dot-com bubble. We started the dot-com bubble."

And what a bubble it was. "Netscape going public stimulated a lot of things," said

Barksdale. "The technologists loved the new technology things it could do, and the

businesspeople and regular folks got excited about how much money they could make.

People saw all those young kids making money out of this and said, 'If those young

kids can do this and make all that money, I can too.' Greed can be a bad thing-folks

thought they could make a lot of money without a lot of work. It certainly led to

a degree of overinvestment, putting it mildly. Every sillier and sillier idea got

funded."

What was it that stimulated investors to believe that demand for Internet usage and

Internet-related products would be infinite? The short answer is digitization. Once

the PC-Windows revolution demonstrated to everyone the value of being able to digitize

information and manipulate it on computers and word processors, and once the browser

brought the Internet alive and made Web pages sing and dance and display, everyone

wanted everything digitized as much as possible so they could send it to someone else

down the Internet pipes. Thus began the digitization revolution. Digitization is that