Word: andreessens
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...typical of Barksdale, 52, who brought his lead-from-the-front style and slow Mississippi drawl to Silicon Valley last spring from AT&T, where he was CEO of AT&T Wireless Services. Though less well known than Netscape's co-founders, Jim Clark and boy wonder Marc Andreessen, 25, Barksdale has what is clearly the most difficult, and most essential, job of the three: getting Netscape to live up to its $3.1 billion market value...
Clark, however, moved on. By 1994 the desktop generation was yielding to the networked, interactive generation. But while his peers were debating how to build the Infobahn, Clark decided it already existed. He'd met Marc Andreessen, who as an undergraduate programmer had helped create the then obscure browsing software Mosaic, which made it easy to navigate the World Wide Web. Navigating the infant Web, which transforms the Internet's isolated, text-based sites into one vast, hyperlinked, multimedia-capable network, got Clark thinking--and acting. He and Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications (soon renamed Netscape) and built a business around...
Clark and Andreessen did, and today they find themselves riding the decade's giddiest economic bubble, counting their stock options and cutting deals with everyone from telephone companies to Hollywood. Virtually the entire data-intensive world--which is to say, virtually the entire world--has concluded that the Web is the future of communications, and is now retooling to stay in lockstep with Netscape (and vice versa: Netscape perpetually updates its browser to accommodate new Web applications). "The list of businesses being transformed," says Clark, includes "broadcasting, publishing, software, finance, shopping, entertainment services, consumer electronics...It's a massive, massive...
Spyglass and Netscape are cousins. The Illinois company controls the original patents for Mosaic, the Internet browser program that Andreessen helped write. Mosaic was licensed to Spyglass by the University of Illinois in 1994. Before that, the company was struggling as it tried to develop three-dimensional visualization software for scientists (the same kind of work that Andreessen was supposed to be doing as he wrote Mosaic). Government grants dried up, and so did Spyglass's business. Colbeth and his wife Margey went through $100,000 in savings to keep the company going. "There's a lot of bad memories...
Conservatives and liberals all seem to regard the high-tech entrepreneur as the ideal economic agent. They do so with good reason, for if capitalism is "creative destruction," in Joseph Schumpeter's famous phrase, then people like Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, Jeff Braun, Bill Schrader and Doug Colbeth are responsible for the creating part. But is there much that conservative or liberal policies can really do to nurture such enterprise? Would Marc Andreessen work harder under a flat tax? The creating part of capitalism is the part that economic laws do not explain. Like a code writer and his code...