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.
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:
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.
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...)
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.''
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.'"
> 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.
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.
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.