Web Master
By Margie Wylie, Nick Wingfield, and Jai Singh
Staff Writers, CNET NEWS.COM
If you're looking for someone to blame the Web on, Marc Andreessen is your guy.
Wondering why software releases are now weeks rather than months apart? It's
a phenomenon called Web Weeks and, yes, it's the chubby, baby-faced
24-year-old multimillionaire's fault. Add it to a long list of ways in which
the Web has
changed our lives, from Web addresses on billboards to talk of online
addiction. Andreessen will tell you he was just in the right place at the
right time when as a college student in Illinois he wrote Mosaic, one of the first graphical Web browsers. Talking to him, you get the feeling that he tripped
and accidentally founded Netscape with Silicon Graphics veteran Jim
Clark. Don't believe it.
Andreessen has, if only temporarily, conquered the Web. About 85 percent of
all browsers in use are made by Netscape. That's gotten the attention of
Microsoft, which now plans to build Web browsing into Windows, a move that
could destroy Netscape in the consumer market. Andreessen's response? Go
after the business market. Andreessen has been exhorting businesses to throw
away Lotus Notes and other "closed" business information systems and move to
the "open" Web. The intranet is born and the idea of "extranets" are
incubating in Andreessen's mind. We'll see just how lucky he is.
NEWS.COM: Are you at all surprised by the kinds of business and cultural
changes you have set off through development of Mosaic?
Andreessen: I laugh every time I open the morning newspaper and half the
articles are about the Internet or something on the Internet. The San Francisco Examiner recently ran
a big article on Stale, this
parody of
Slate. Here's an article in a
newspaper
about a Web site. It's like just a totally normal thing these days.
I've been waiting for three years now for the level of interest to crest and
it hasn't. I get the feeling increasingly that we're at the very beginning
of a very long-term ramp up. This is just the start. And so I think the
changes over the next five or ten years are really going to be profound, and
we're only starting to see some of them.
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