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Hard Knocks, Age Transform Marc Andreessen

Posted by Zonk on Fri Aug 18, 2006 11:37 AM
from the netscraped dept.
Netscape The Internet The Almighty Buck Businesses
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Marc Andreessen, the brain behind Netscape, has spent the past several years engaged in an old-fashioned pursuit: rebuilding a traditional software company, Opsware, and trying to make it profitable, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'That he is making progress will be evident next week when the company expects to report a hefty quarterly revenue increase. In the process, he has settled down personally, morphing from technical whiz kid into serious businessman — the kind who delegates authority, makes sales calls in suits and dabbles in philanthropy. His experience helping bring Opsware back from the brink of financial disaster — in 2001, the company, then called Loudcloud Inc., staged a disappointing IPO and later had to completely overhaul its business to stay afloat — also has been formative, those who know him say.'"
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  • I'm sure his clients on the other end of the phone are amazed by just how shiny Marc's shoes must be, if they could see them...

    • Re:"Makes sales calls in suits" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alex P Keaton in da (882660) on Friday August 18 2006, @11:46AM (#15935593) Homepage
      I assume you are kidding, but "sales calls" includes in person visits. Like as in "calling on a client." It isn't just telephoning...
      It is interesting how important attire can be. It reminds me of that picture of the early staffers at Microsoft with the caption "Would you have invested?" But on the flip side, even with a good idea, it is tough to make sales in sandals and shorts....
      • Had a picnic this summer during my internship. All sorts of other interns were there. One intern had a really nice suit, and remarked how, when wearing a suit, people kept assuming that he was someone important, that he was some sort of management/executive type there to help organize the event. And even in the office, people would hold open doors for him and such...

        That's about what I was thinking too.

        And that's just internally.

    • From TFA:

      Mr. Andreessen says he traveled extensively to make in-person sales calls

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Marc Andreessen is just a lucky guy in the right place at the right time. Was he amazingly technical and a visionary? Not really, the basic concepts, technology and applications were already there for him. Besides it was the suits and their VC buddies at the time that really made Netscape what it was.

      Marc Andreessen stood on the shoulders of people like Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, Jon Postel, etc. Visionary? No. Opportunist? Yes!

      I don't knock the guy for trying to make a buck. I knock t
      • It's not that creating something like Netscape was technically difficult. It's that it was the right idea, put together properly. It takes timing, vision, persistance and a bit of luck to make anything work. What have you created that we should know about?

        Myspace? Jesus give me a week I can duplicate it.
        Facebook? You cannot even search the "messages" you get. Christ how hard is that?
        YouTube? Uh...?

        None of these sites are that amazing. They were just there at the right time and place.

  • Loudcloud was a loser from the start (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eln (21727) * on Friday August 18 2006, @11:47AM (#15935601) Homepage
    I remember when Andreesen started talking about his new Loudcloud company, and I was certain it was going to fail. It had nothing going for it that could make it any money other than Marc Andreesen's name. Now, it appears I was at least partially right, since the only way they've managed to keep from going out of business is to completely change what it is their company does. Even now, it's not really profitable, and it's trying to compete in a space already dominated by much larger companies. If this company wasn't being run by one of the biggest names in the Internet revolution, it would have run out of investors years ago.

    It sort of reminds me of a company I used to work for that has continually stayed just above the edge of bankruptcy by completely changing its business model (and its name) to fit the trend of the moment. It started out as a cable company, became an ISP during the boom, then became a wireless ISP, and now it's a real estate company.
      • Reminds me of VA Linux (you might remember them). Their initial business plan was to sell dell computers with a copy of red hat linux installed on it. They purchased andover.net (slashdot, newsforge, freshmeat, etc) for pr/advertising.

        Wow. I'm a pretty goddamn jaded motherfucker when it comes to VA Linux, and I *worked* there. You're completely wrong. You're an AC, so I'm not going to go into how stupidly wrong you are.

        Emm

  • Before and after battling Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Friday August 18 2006, @11:56AM (#15935659) Journal
    Look up your favorite picture of Garfield. Then look up your favorite picture of Bill the Cat.

  • Mr. Andreessen... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chaffar (670874) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:03PM (#15935716)
    Why, Mr. Andreessen? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than just your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Andreessen. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Andreessen. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Andreessen? Why?! Why do you persist!?

  • He's deep into the Dark Side (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:03PM (#15935717)

    the kind who delegates authority,

    Yup. That's one of the first signs.

    makes sales calls in suits

    That's the seventh sign, unless you're hasidic, then it's the third, although gnostics numer it fourth.

    and dabbles in philanthropy.

    And that's the bottom. Darth Vader gave lots of surplus Imperial cheese to orphans. Emperor Ming would write checks to the Mongo Salvation Army. And then there's Ronald McDonald House as an attempt to karmically balance the hideous doings of that evil clown. It's all just a front.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        He gave poor people GAS!

        So does Taco Bell, but no one apologizes for them.

  • Second most overrated man in tech (Score:3, Insightful)

    by monopole (44023) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:06PM (#15935742)
    Marc Andreessen, short of Jaron Lanier, the most overrated poseur in tech. Glory hound, marginal programmer, front man for Jim Clark, thew guy who threw away the biggest tech opprotunity since M$ sold IBM DOS. Check out this article "Imposter Boy":
    http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html [archive.org]
    The fact that he gets glowing articles for wearing a suit is a true case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

    • Re:Second most overrated man in tech (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Friday August 18 2006, @12:59PM (#15936110) Homepage Journal
      The fact that he gets glowing articles for wearing a suit is a true case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

      It's the WSJ, what do you expect? That a newspaper of the PHB's, by the PHB's, and for the PHB's should see a former iconoclast going corporate as a praiseworthy sign of maturity isn't exactly a surprise.
    • That's pretty much in line with what I know of him from a friend of mine who knew him well back in the NCSA days. You've gotta give him credit for grabbing on to the web thing as it was taking off and getting a good ride, though. My friend's observations were that Marc wasn't a particularly noteworthy guy. Andreessen was a "bright enough" guy in the right place at the right time; but all the media hype that still gets him the title of "technical whiz kid" on the front page of /. was mostly manufactured b
  • Waaah, I'm the co-founder of Netscape! Waaah, everyone loves me, and I'm an icon of the dot-com industry!

    Want some hard knocks? Try not working for 6+months because of the dot-com slump; try working your way back to your pre-dot-com salary from a figure less than half that once you WERE able to find a job!
    • Try not working for 6+months because of the dot-com slump;

      Given how much he sold Netscape for, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried not working for 6+ months because of the dot-com boom.

  • Is it just me? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mcrbids (148650) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:54PM (#15936079) Journal
    Who else read "Oopsware" instead of "Opsware"?

  • Headline Cut Short (Score:3, Funny)

    by Phat_Tony (661117) on Friday August 18 2006, @02:43PM (#15936766)
    Zonk cut the original headline short- it was supposed to read:

    "Hard Knocks, Age Transform Marc Andreessen into giant battle robot!"
  • This dude Andreesen was living two lives. In one, he was a computer guy for a respectable software company. You know, had a social security number, paid his taxes and helped the landlady take out her garbage. In the other, he was a black hat and was guilty of pretty well every computer crime.

    Anyways, he took this blue pill and life went on as normal

    ws
  • uh.. whatever success Opsware has/had is in large part due to their excellent CTO/spiritual leader and the go-to guy for their customers - Tim Howes. Andreesen's name helps and he has grown a lifetime in the last five years but is not the primary reason (imho) for Opsware's success.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Enoxice (993945)
      "Hopefully it doesn't become another netscape."

      Actually, I'm sure he'd like it to become another netscape; netscape was the final word in browsing back in the day (before msie was standard). The problem was it fell behind it's competitors and sort of lost focus.

      References: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Commun i cations_Corporation]Wikipedia[/url]:"Netscape had a successful IPO on August 9, 1995. The stock was to be offered at $14 per share; a last-minute decision doubled the initial offer
      • Actually, I'm sure he'd like it to become another netscape; netscape was the final word in browsing back in the day (before msie was standard). The problem was it fell behind it's competitors and sort of lost focus.

        Netscape was a great business (and had a great browser) when it was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Most of the issues with the browser started after that.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by eln (21727) *
          Netscape's browser had already been soundly defeated by 1999. The bloated pig that was Netscape 4.0 (Netscape Communicator) was released in 1997, and pretty much spelled the end for Netscape's browser business. That was when the most serious issues with the browser from a technical perspective happened. By 1999, Netscape had already started the Mozilla Project, and had essentially abandoned the Netscape browser as a source of revenue.

          AOL bought Netscape for so much money primarily because of its netscape
          • "AOL bought Netscape for so much money primarily because of its netscape.com portal site, which at the time was one of the most popular sites on the Internet."

            Ironically that's because it was the default page for Netscape to open up to. Absent some action by a user to exlpicitly set it somewhere else (and where else was there) the outcoe could be nothing else.

          • Yeah Communicator was a fucking hog. It aspired to be so much more than a browser and ended up suffocating under it's own fat. The Communicator 'suite' consisted of a news reader, a mail client, a web browser and a lightweight WYSIWYG html editor. While I liked the news reader (nicely threaded) the rest of it was for the birds.

            Firefox at least has the wisdom to let users choose what kind of extra pork to add to the browser via the beautifully simple extensions manager. That and they keep the mail cl
              • There's nothing wrong, persay, with the act of bundling, but it adds a bunch of resource-hogging bloat depending on how the bundle is configured. See any consumer level Dell fresh out of the box for an example.
        • Most of the issues with the browser started after that.

          Really??? That's not how I remember it. I myself am aligned with Charles Ferguson's (yeah, arrogant) take [amazon.com] on the matter...

        • Netscape was a great business (and had a great browser) when it was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Most of the issues with the browser started after that.

          You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion:
          • A browser that was mostly given away for free, and was rapidly losing market share to Internet Explorer
          • A www server that was well on its way to oblivion, courtesy of Apache
          • A popular portal site which would almost certainly decline once the browser no longer dominate
          • You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion...

            First of all, I never said Netscape was worth $4.2 billion or that AOL got a great deal. I just said it was a great business at that time. Since it was bought it has been severly mismanged by AOL. $4.2 billion was an outrageous price, but that's what things were selling for at the time. It did have clear assets that would be highly profitable today if they had been managed properly.

            A browser that was mostly given a
        • AOL either bought Netscape out of stupidity or to get the ability to extort money out of MS. Although they ended up getting a lot of money from MS, they still didn't get enough to make a profit on the deal.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by eln (21727) *
      This company is the former LoudCloud. They changed their name and basically became an entirely different company with an entirely different business plan, but it is still technically the same company.
    • He has *another* company? What the hell happened to his last company, LoudCloud?

      From the fourth sentence OF THE SUMMARY: "His experience helping bring Opsware back from the brink of financial disaster -- in 2001, the company, then called Loudcloud Inc...." I'm guessing you never did do too well on those pesky reading comprehension tests...

    • Re:he has a new company? (Score:5, Informative)

      by valdezjuan (83925) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:29PM (#15935893)
      His new company is called Ning [ning.com].

      Loudcloud was a managed hosting provider, that also made software that allowed servers/network devices to be monitored, deployed and controled with a small number of highly technical staff. The benefit to the customer is/was that they don't have to pay for the high priced technical staff that is needed to host their site. Loudcloud had some of the best people I have ever worked with. It was a great place to work at. Sadly, because of some mistakes, Loudcloud ended up running very low on cash and management decided to sell the hosting part of the company to EDS (which already had a hosting division).

      If you have the chance to look at Opsware's newest products (NAS & SAS), you should. I recently saw a demo of the NAS product (Network Automation tool), and it is super slick. The product flat out rocks. You can manage all of your switches, firewalls, routers, and load balancers, through a very slick web interface. A very nice product.

    • Re:Oh how times change (Score:4, Insightful)

      by monoqlith (610041) on Friday August 18 2006, @12:47PM (#15936018)
      Maybe you are not aware than Marc Andreessen worked at NCSA and invented Mosaic, [ibiblio.org] upon whose layout every modern web browser is based. So basically nearly every aspect of the web interface you were looking when you posted this troll was invented by him.

      Considering Mosaic was the first web browser to run on Windows, it is very much accurate to credit Marc Andreessen with setting the World Wide Web into motion and bringing it to the people. Meanwhile Microsoft missed the boat and only entered the browser market when it became very obvious that this Netscape thing was becoming very profitable and they wanted a piece. They then copied every aspect of the browser, packaged it into their operating system, thereby locking people in unknowingly, and to this day they continue to willfully 'invent new features'(read: break agreed upon standards) in order to keep other browsers out of their cheaply earned monopoly.

      So. 'Visionary' turns out to be an apt label for him. Apt, I say!
        • Yes. This is what happens when visionaries go up against beheamoth monopolies. Tech visionaries tend not to be cynical, realistic, or even all that competitive when they first try to sell their ideas. They're not therefore prepared to deal with people who play dirty and are only out to win, as Microsoft does. They naively believe that the quality and freshness of their ideas is the only thing required to take their product to the top and leave it there.

          Unfortunately this often results in people tak
            • Calm. Down. I've seen this four or five times in the past day or two - people not comprehending what I say, or just selectively reading my points to construct the weakest possible straw man.

              I never said that Netscape was a perfect browser, or that Marc Andreessen didn't screw up his advantage. I just said he was a visionary. Which he was.

              In fact I just conceded that he wasn't a good businessman.

              Read my reply to your other rant.
              • In addition: Just because Microsoft won on features doesn't mean they also didn't steal the foundation of their browser or that they didn't do so unfairly - the thing that required the most vision was still the basic browser GUI and HTML rendering, and these are things they definitely stole. They didn't even develop the Explorer foundation themselves - they bought Spyglass Mosaic which also utilized Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic code. So yeah - everything eventually comes back to Andreessen.

                Are you ready to admi

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by monoqlith (610041)

          Um, I don't know what aspects of the browser you're not supposed to "copy". Did you level that accusation at Opera too?

          I don't know - by not copying it?

          First of all Opera came after Mosaic(1992) and Internet explorer(1995) in 1996, and by that time the standard interface was entrenched in the popular consciousness. What you are saying here again proves my point. The fact that every browser since Mosaic has used basically the same interface layout invented by Andreessen pretty much proves that no one else ha
          • Success indeed, if only by the most selfish measure: persoanl financial gain.

            I'd give Jim Clark the credit for that aspect of it though. If Clark hadn't turned Netscape into a "business" it's pretty uncertain what would have happened with Andressen...succesful, probably. Fiendishly rich? Who knows.
            • But for the ones that were there when the WWW became popular, Mosaic was synonymous with Internet, and Andreessen was the prophet.

              There was HotJava, a browser developped by Sun in Java, more as a proof of concept of the language than as a real application powerhouse, and there was Amaya, the W3C browser released to test compliant HTML code.

              And that was pretty much all the game in town.

              You can find all this by yourself, to ask for references to what is pretty much well dcoumented history is lazy and disingen
    • ...hard work and actual vision of people like Tim Berners-Lee .

      Uh I think you misspelt Al Gore's name

    • It seems like he had a lot of emacs responsibility at one time. Wouldn't that have to be earned?

      JWZ mentions him here. [jwz.org]

      Linuxgazette mentions his work on HTML extensions for emacs here [linuxgazette.net].

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