Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen brought the World Wide Web and its wealth of information, graphics, and services to the desktop, setting the stage for the “e-commerce” revolution of the later 1990s. As founder of Netscape, Andreessen also created the first big “dot-com,” as companies doing business on the Internet came to be called.
By the early 1990s, the World Wide Web (created by TIM BERNERS-LEE) was poised to change the way information and services were delivered to users. However, early Web browsers ran mainly on machines using UNIX, a somewhat esoteric operating system used primarily by students and scientists on college campuses and at research institutes (Berners-Lee had been working at CERN, the European nuclear physics laboratory.) The early Web generally consisted only of linked pages of text, without the graphics and interactive features that adorn webpages today. Besides looking boring, early webpages were hard for inexperienced people to navigate. Marc Andreessen would change all that. Marc Andreessen was born on July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. That made him part of a generation that would grow up with personal computers, computer games, and computer graphics. Indeed, when Marc was only nine years old he learned the BASIC computer language from a book in his school’s library, and then proceeded to write a program to help him with his math homework. Unfortunately, he did not have a floppy disk to save the program on, so it disappeared when the school’s janitor turned off the machine.
Marc got his own personal computer in seventh grade, and tinkered on many sorts of programs through high school. He then studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Despite his devotion to programming, he impressed his fellow students as a Renaissance man. One of them recalled in an interview that “A conversation with Andreessen jumps across a whole range of ungeekish subjects, including classical music, history, philosophy, the media, and business strategy. It’s as if he has a hypertext brain.”
Andreessen encountered the Web shortly after it was introduced in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. He was impressed by the power of the new medium, which enabled many kinds of information to be accessed using the existing Internet, but became determined to make it more accessible to ordinary people. In 1993, while still an undergraduate, he won an internship at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Given the opportunity to write a better Web browser, Andreessen, together with colleague Eric Bina and other helpers, set to work on what became known as the Mosaic web browser. Since their work was paid for by the government, Mosaic was offered free to users over the Internet. Mosaic could show pictures as well as text, and users could follow Web links simply by clicking on them with the mouse. The userfriendly program became immensely popular, with more than 10 million users by 1995. After earning his B.S. degree in computer science, Andreessen left Mosaic, having battled with its managers over the future of Web browsing software. He went to the area south of San Francisco Bay, a hotbed of startup companies known as Silicon Valley, which had become a magnet for venture capital in the 1990s. There he met Jim Clark, an older entrepreneur who had been chief executive officer (CEO) of Silicon Graphics. Clark liked Andreessen and agreed to help him build a business based on the Web. They founded Netscape Corporation in 1994, using $4 million seed capital provided by Clark. Andreessen recruited many of his former colleagues at NCSA to help him write a new Web browser, which became known as Netscape Navigator. Navigator was faster and more graphically attractive than Mosaic. Most important, Netscape added a secure encrypted facility that people could use to send their credit card numbers to online merchants. This was part of a twopronged strategy: First, attract the lion’s share of Web users to the new browser, then sell businesses the software they would need to create effective Web pages for selling products and services to users.
By the end of 1994, Navigator had gained 70 percent of the Web browser market. Time magazine named the browser one of the 10 best products of the year, and Netscape was soon selling custom software to companies that wanted a presence on the Web. The e-commerce boom of the later 1990s had begun, and Marc Andreessen was one of its brightest stars. When Netscape offered its stock to the public in summer 1995, the company gained a total worth of $2.3 billion, more than that of many traditional blue-chip industrial companies. Andreessen’s own shares were worth $55 million.
Microsoft under BILL GATES had been slow to recognize the growing importance of the Web.
However, as users began to spend more and more time interacting with the Netscape window, Microsoft began to worry that its dominance of the desktop market was in jeopardy. Navigator could run not only on Microsoft Windows PCs, but also on Macintoshes and even on machines running versions of UNIX. Further, a new programming language called Java, developed by JAMES GOSLING made it possible to write programs that users could run from Web pages without being limited to Windows or any other operating system. If such applications became ubiquitous, then the combination of Navigator (and other Netscape software) plus Java could in effect replace the Windows desktop.
Microsoft responded by creating its own Web browser, called Internet Explorer. Although technical reviewers generally considered the Microsoft product to be inferior to Netscape, it gradually improved. Most significantly, Microsoft included Explorer with its new Windows 95 operating system. This “bundling” meant that PC makers and consumers had little interest in paying for Navigator when they already had a “free” browser from Microsoft. In response to this move, Netscape and other Microsoft competitors helped promote the antitrust case against Microsoft that would result in 2001 in some of the company’s practices being declared an unlawful use of monopoly power. Andreessen also responded to Microsoft by focusing on the added value of software for Web servers, while making Navigator “open source,” meaning that anyone was allowed to access and modify the program’s code. He hoped that a vigorous community of programmers might help keep Navigator technically superior to Internet Explorer. However, Netscape’s revenues began to decline steadily. In 1999 America Online (AOL) bought Netscape, seeking to add its technical assets and Webcenter online portal to its own offerings.
After a brief stint with AOL as its “principal technical visionary,” Andreessen decided to start his own company, called LoudCloud. The company provided website development, management and custom software (including e-commerce “shopping basket” systems) for corporations that have large, complex websites. Through 2001, Andreessen vigorously promoted the company, seeking to raise enough operating capital to continue after the crash of the Internet industry. However, after a continuing decline in profitability Andreessen sold LoudCloud’s Web management business to Texas-based Electronic Data Systems (EDS), retaining the smaller (software) side of the business under a new name, Opsware.
While the future of his recent ventures remains uncertain, Marc Andreessen’s place as one of the key pioneers of the Web and e-commerce is assured. His inventiveness, technical insight, and business acumen made him a model for a new generation of Internet entrepreneurs. Andreessen was named one of the Top 50 People Under the Age of 40 by Time magazine (1994) and has received the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award for Leadership (1995) and the W. Wallace McDowell Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society (1997).