

The Education of Marc Andreessen (1998) - johnny99
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/15/topstory.htm

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akbar501
> 3,200 employees.

This number tells so much about the improvements in developer productivity
over the years.

Adjusting for TVM, the same revenue is now supported by far fewer engineers
(obviously not all 3,200 employees where engineers). The Netscape engineers
were highly skilled, so the change in the number of engineers cannot be
explained away by differences in engineering skill/capability.

~~~
glurgh
It doesn't really say much about developer productivity. What are you
comparing this to? You might also be forgetting the insane number of (many
'enterprise') products Netscape was trying to churn out at the time. See:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html)

The browser alone with all of its extra doodads ran on three radically
different platform families (Windows 95/NT, Mac OS, Several proprietary
Unixes). And that's just the browser. Throw in running one of the top traffic
sites at the time.

The internet advertising market which drives a lot of the revenue at many
current similar startups was far smaller and less mature, as well. It's
difficult to see how we can draw any sensible conclusion about developer
productivity from all this.

~~~
bshimmin
There should be a "NSFW" equivalent for articles with potentially harmful
levels of smug. (I've read a lot of articles by jwz over many years, and he is
how he is, but still...)

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nrao123
This is such a great article! Literally, goes through the highs and lows and
gives a lot of context to the tweet storming Marc!

Required reading for any founders. You can see the parallels between him &
other founders as they metamorphize from boy wunder (mustang car, late to
meetings...) to this:

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Andreessen's transformation from a smug dreamer to a realistic doer has been
closely monitored by others in the industry. Patricia Sueltz, general manager
of Java software for IBM, has noticed that Andreessen no longer talks about
Netscape going it alone. Instead, he's open to collaboration. ''He's a more
pragmatic businessman,'' she says. John Doerr, a venture capitalist with
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an Andreessen mentor, says Andreessen
isn't a wild-eyed rebel anymore. ''He has retained his fresh point of view
about what's possible,'' says Doerr. ''But now he listens much better. He has
grown a lot, and it's not over.''

====

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johnny99
This is before AOL bought Netscape, before Loudcloud/Opsware, before Ning,
before A16Z. It's interesting, knowing what came later, to see how he's
described. It's a sympathetic profile, but it hints that he might be a one-hit
wonder. The last quote is good: "And while it's unlikely that Andreessen will
change the world again with another Mosaic-like discovery, Mary Meeker, an
analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., says: 'He'll be a great CEO--5 to
10 years from now.'"

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presty
> Andreessen has acquired more grown-up tastes, too. The chubby 6-foot, 4-inch
> lad who dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals in 1994 has shed about 30
> pounds and now fancies Ermenegildo Zegna suits and Robert Talbot shirts.
> Greasy hamburgers and milkshakes are out, replaced by grilled sturgeon and
> chardonnay. And he has traded in his red Mustang for a more sober white
> Mercedes-Benz S600 sedan.

yo pmarca, what prompted this change?

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leoc
Does anyone have a citation for and/or the full original words of Andreesen's
famous and important "poorly debugged set of device drivers" remark? The best
I can find is [http://ianmurdock.com/cloud/windows-as-a-poorly-debugged-
set...](http://ianmurdock.com/cloud/windows-as-a-poorly-debugged-set-of-
device-drivers/) .

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nrao123
Apparently he didn't say it:

[http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/](http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/)

====

Anderson: A quote of yours that I’ve always loved is that Netscape would
render Windows “a poorly debugged set of device drivers.”

Andreessen: In fairness, you have to give credit for that quote to Bob
Metcalfe, the 3Com founder.

Anderson: Oh, it wasn’t you? It’s always attributed to you.

Andreessen: I used to say it, but it was a retweet on my part. [Laughs.] But
yes, the idea we had then, which seems obvious today, was to lift the
computing off of each user’s device and perform it in the network instead.
It’s something I think is inherent in the technology—what some thinkers refer
to as the “technological imperative.” It’s as if the technology wants it to
happen.

~~~
leoc
Thanks! Come to think of it, I think I've seen Bob Metcalfe say it in a video.

