wild 1995

Chapter 94 Opponents
Mark Anderson is considered to be one of the luckiest billionaires in Silicon Valley, known as the "Golden Boy". He was born in 1971. When he was studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992, he went to work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on campus, with an hourly salary of $6.8.

As of November 1992, there were only 11 web servers in the world, and NCSA happened to have one. Anderson often played online games when he was part-time job. He found that the browsers were all text interfaces, which was very inconvenient to use. So he found a programming expert named Eric Bina to cooperate and wrote the Mosic browser in 26 weeks.

Mosic has two very key innovations. One is the use of a graphical interface, which can open hyperlinks with a click of the mouse. The other is that it can directly display pictures instead of opening them as files, which greatly improves the ease of use. Therefore, once launched, it immediately became a hit and soon gained millions of users.

Before the release of Mosic, the World Wide Web was very niche, accounting for only 0.5% of global Internet traffic, far behind applications such as FTP, newsgroups, and e-mail. After the release of Mosic, it took only 2 years for the traffic of the World Wide Web to rise to 24%, from the bottom one to the positive number one, and gradually became synonymous with the Internet.

Therefore, Mosic is recognized as the world's first successful browser, which is of epoch-making significance. If Anderson continues to study at NCSA, he may become a top computer scientist in the future and win the Turing Award like Tim Berners-Lee.

However, the fate of the workers cannot be determined by themselves. With the increasing popularity of Mosic, the "New York Times" and other media began to rush to report. The senior management of NCSA jumped out to pick the peaches.

At the same time, civil strife broke out in SGI, which provided visual effects for Hollywood blockbusters such as "Jurassic Park". The founder Jim Clark was kicked out of the company by the board of directors and was about to start a new business, so he sent an email to Anderson.

After the establishment of the company, Anderson ran back to NCSA with the $400 million invested by Clark. With an annual salary of $8 and 1% stock options, he poached all the members of the Mosic R&D team, and then changed the company name to "Mosic Communications Company" to re-develop the browser.

After 5 months of research and development, the beta version of the new browser was released in October 1994. At first, it wanted to catch the popularity of Mosic and named it Mosaic Netscape 10, but was warned by the NCSA lawyer letter, so it had to change the name to Netscape Navigator. Unexpectedly, it became a hit and was more popular than Mosic, with more than 0.9 million downloads in just one month.

Encouraged by this, Anderson changed the company name from "Mosic Communications Company" to Netscape in November 1994. The Chinese translation is called Netscape, and then received 11 million US dollars invested by KPCB.

By February 1995, Netscape had hundreds of employees and accounted for more than 2% of the browser market. The company's board of directors believed that the time for listing was ripe, so they recruited AT&T executive Jim Barksdale to serve as CEO, and asked Mark Anderson to be the chief technology officer.

Perhaps the behavior of NCSA executives picking peaches through the media has taught Anderson too profound a lesson. Although he was changed to the chief technology officer, he rarely went to the R&D department, and he never wrote a line of code. He only cared about dealing with the media every day.

When Michael Toy found Anderson, he was receiving a phone interview from a media in his office. After talking for more than ten minutes, he hung up the phone and asked, "What happened?"

"Mark, there is an open source and free browser called Athlon on the Internet. You should check it out. Jamie has already uploaded it to the company's file server."

Anderson found Athlon from the server. After downloading it, he tried it for a while and asked, "What open source license does it use?"

"It is the little red flower license created by the author LRF, which is similar to the BSD agreement, but the wording is more rigorous."

"How long will it take for our next version of the browser to be developed?"

"At least five months."

Anderson put down the mouse, frowned and said, "Now we're in trouble! In order to please Wall Street, Barksdale is going to charge browser users $99 for business users and $49 for ordinary users. If we really do this, Athlon will quickly snatch our users away."

When Netscape 1.0 was officially released, the top management of the company believed that it should be charged. Only Anderson resisted the crowd and insisted on free distribution.

Hearing what Anderson said now, Toy was also a little flustered, and said: "Mark, although Athlon is not as feature-rich as our browser, it can at least meet more than 80% of users' needs. You'd better let him stop charging."

"But Wall Street is not satisfied with our financial statements. If the browser does not charge, the server alone will not be profitable."

In addition to the browser, Netscape’s products also include web servers. The hardware is purchased from other companies, and the software is modified from NCSA’s HTTPd. It is very expensive, and a set costs tens of thousands of dollars. However, HTTPd itself is open source, and there is always a research and development team to fix bugs and update functions. Therefore, Netscape’s server sales are very average, and it is losing money every month.

Toy also couldn't think of a way to make a profit, but he was only the R&D director and didn't have to worry about operations, so he told about Microsoft's plan to purchase the Mosic browser license and asked Anderson what to do.

"Jamie's news is too late. Microsoft bought Mosic's license for $200 million last month, but Mosic is outdated, so there is nothing to worry about, but this Athlon is different. It is very close to our browser's functionality."

Anderson picked up the mouse, tried the Athlon again for a while, and then asked, "Is the SSL and cookie technology you mentioned last time available now?"

Toy shook his head and explained: "SSL 1.0 is flawed. After testing, it was found to be not secure enough. We are improving it, and there are some problems with cookies that need to be resolved."

"Does it support GIF dynamic pictures?"

"There is no problem with this, the internal beta version has been used."

"Just one GIF is not enough for users to pay...Do you know who the author of this Athlon is?"

"It's a Chinese student. There is a section of his self-introduction on Athlon's official website."

Anderson opened the official website and looked at it, couldn't help laughing, and said in a mocking tone: "This guy actually wants to be the sheriff of the World Wide Web? Does he think he is Jordan?"

In the western United States in the 19th century, the sheriff had the power of life and death, and he was the most powerful person in the place. So when Jordan joined the Dream Team in 1992, he told Larry Bird and Magic Johnson that there was a new sheriff in the town.

Toy is a fan of Jordan and is very familiar with this gossip, saying: "He is Chinese, so he probably doesn't know what the sheriff means in the United States."

"Maybe."

After reading Di Ye's autobiography, Anderson said, "This guy is about to graduate from college, how about we recruit him to the company?"

When developing Netscape 0.9 last year, there were only 7 employees under Toy, who were responsible for developing the Unix version, Windows version and Mac version respectively. Although the work intensity was high and they had to work more than ten hours a day, everyone was dedicated to their work, with high efficiency and a harmonious atmosphere.

After Netscape received $11 million in investment in November, it acquired several small companies and recruited some new employees. As a result, work efficiency dropped, and the atmosphere was not as harmonious as before. Toy was very troubled by this, and said: "I don't think a person who wants to be a sheriff will be a good employee."

"Michael, he is a Chinese, no Chinese would not want to come to work in the US, and have you ever seen unruly Chinese? I'll write him an email right now."

"Then try it."

While Mark Anderson was writing an e-mail to Di Ye in Mountain View, two developers were looking at Athlon's source code at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle.

Maybe it was God’s will, or it was pure coincidence. On April 1994, 4, Clark and Anderson had just founded Netscape. On April 4, Bill Gates called high-level technical personnel to hold a meeting on the Internet, and published a memo called "Internet Wave", requiring all Microsoft products to consider Internet issues. After the meeting, a six-member browser development team was specially set up.

After discussion, the development team decided not to develop their own, but to purchase a mature browser directly from the market. However, Microsoft was deeply troubled by large companies at this time, and the implementation of the acquisition plan was extremely procrastinated.

Spyglass is a small company founded by several graduates of the University of Illinois. After Mark Anderson took over the Mosic R&D team, NCSA did not form a new R&D team, but directly sold Mosic to Spyglass. The development team believed that the company’s products were well established and should be able to compete with Netscape.

After the development team submitted the report, Microsoft sent a negotiating team composed of lawyers and business managers to contact Spyglass as usual. They first offered a very low quotation, then repeatedly put pressure on them, and dragged down the opponent step by step through lengthy negotiations. In the end, it took more than two months to buy the source code and authorization of Mosic for $200 million.

Although this kind of operation saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, it allowed Netscape to grow in size within two months and become the dominant player in the browser market.

However, a bigger tragedy was yet to come. When the negotiating team brought the Mosic browser back to Microsoft headquarters, the development team found that it was still the 1993 version and could no longer adapt to the Internet in 1995. Not only did most of the code have to be rewritten, but also many new functions needed to be added. It was almost impossible to catch up with the Windows 8 release in August.

"How about we port Athlon into Windows 95?"

"According to the Little Red Flower license, after transplanting and modifying, we need to place a copyright statement, which will definitely be discovered by employees of other departments, and the responsibility for spending $200 million to buy Mosic will fall on the two of us."

Although the browser development team was established by Bill Gates himself, he was not in charge of it himself. As a result, the positioning was very vague. It was suspended in the air and was neither under the management of the operating system department nor the office software department.

"What should I do?"

"Let's make do with Mosic first, in case it's changed before August."

(End of this chapter)