Did you know the fascinating story behind why we don’t pay for a web browser?
Or how Mozilla got its name
At that point in time, accessing the internet was a closed academic thing.
“The key technical people didn’t want the internet to become easy to use or graphical because that would pollute the environment”
It was meant to be ‘only smart people could use the internet so we needed to keep it hard to use’
So Marc Andreessen is back then this young kid putting himself through college at University of Illinois while working at the attached National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
He fundamentally disagrees with that. His playbook to success is simple – ‘let’s take something very esoteric, make it very available to everyone’
He comes up with the original Mosiac Browser – the gateway that opens up the world wide web to the millions of users across the world
He eventually graduates and Mosaic becomes a NCSA thing – not a Marc’s thing.
Eventually he meets Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. They brainstorm ideas and decide to recreate Mosaic and commercialize it. They eventually come up with the company that is the first IPO blockbuster – Netscape – first real internet tech startup
So their browser Mozilla internally stands for Mosaic killer
In April ‘94, Netscape had an 80% market share of web browsers in the world and had successfully killed Mosaic by then.
They go public at $20/share. It opens at $75/share and gives the company a 3 Bn market cap
It is a beautiful time-tested business model
Give away the consumer thing for free, get as many people on that as you possibly can. It’s actually the first real example of aggregation theory.
Netscape ends up becoming powerful in the ecosystem because they are able to get all the internet users using it.
And yes, it is the same Marc Andreesen of Andreesen Horowitz. Its a story that inspires.
Acquired has a brilliant podcast with the story –
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/andreessen-horowitz-part-i
*********************************************************
#reviewswithranjani
#technologiesofthefuture