Silicon Insider: Browser Wars
Jan. 6, 2005 -- -- The least-noticed big tech story of the last six months has been the rekindling of the Browser Wars -- a market struggle most of us assumed was over nearly a decade ago.
It is a reminder that, in high-tech, where change is continuous, there is never a permanent victory. And that even the walking dead can sometimes come back to life.
I remember having dinner in the mid-1990s with Marc Andreesen, then the wunderkind of Silicon Valley. His company, Netscape, was that era's equivalent of Google, and its impending IPO would put Marc on magazine covers and set off the dotcom boom. Netscape was the biggest shooting star high-tech had seen since Oracle, or perhaps even Apple, and Andreesen was the town's newest, and youngest, superstar.
We met at what was, and still is, his favorite restaurant, Hobee's -- a kind of funky, Marin-ish neo-diner. Marc drove up in a battered Mustang and unfolded his 6'3" frame to climb out. He was impossibly young -- in his mid-20s -- for a Valley tycoon; and in his worn jeans and blazing white running shoes, looked like a college junior.
Marc was also blazingly smart. He spoke in that soft, rapid-fire style of people whose brains are perpetually frustrated by the slowness of the spoken word. And as we sat munching on burgers, I just did my best to keep up.
I had assumed when he called about dinner that it was the standard network-maintenance deal: the new executive calls all the local reporters and editors in turn, takes them out to lunch or dinner, makes their acquaintance in hopes of being treated well in print (it doesn't usually work), and, at some point in the meal, make a brief pitch about how well the company is doing. Executives hate these things, as do reporters, and I tried to never do them.
But this was different. This was a Prince of the Valley, and he was not known as a person who did meet-and-greets. As it turned out, the dinner was unlike anything I expected.
For one thing, we never talked about Netscape. Instead, the entire evening revolved around a single question raised by Andreesen even before the burgers arrived: "How do we beat Microsoft?"
It was a rhetorical question, a plea, a demand, and a cry of despair all in one. For one thing, I was an editor, and not in the business of helping one company compete against another. Furthermore, I didn't even know Microsoft was going after Netscape; there had been a few rumors that MS, blindsided by the sudden success of Netscape Navigator, was secretly working on a competing browser design. So it seemed odd that Andreesen was so worried about what was, at best, a phantom competitor.
