I’ve never been a fan of the wunderkind, superhuman persona that Marc Andreessen used to have in the press. It struck me as overly idealized and thus false. Last week, for the first time, I heard him speak (on a podcast) and got the chance to gain some insight into what he’s like and what role he really played in the popularization of the Internet.

My impression had been that he must have been a charismatic, talented programmer when he was at the University of Illinois. I remember a story Jim Clark told about deciding that the web was going to be big, wanting to start an Internet company, seeing potential in Mosaic, asking around the NCSA team who was the right person to talk to, and everybody saying Marc was the team star and innovator. (Apparently Marc was the one who first added images to HTML.) From that story it seemed that Marc was good at leading a small pioneering team. Jim brought capital and business experience, and the result was Netscape, for a while a run-away success. Marc fueled that success by being the perfect front man for the press, in addition to helping lead technical innovation at Netscape. For example, according to Marc, Netscape decided that Java was too complex, and came up with Javascript, which today, in combination with XML as Ajax, is an important driver of the new wave of enhanced web applications.

I think of the situation that Marc was in; he was represented as infallibly brilliant and visionary. At the time, there was a perception that people in their 20’s could build and run large companies, or run large departments in large companies. If your name is Michael Dell or Bill Gates then that’s true, but for most people, it takes time to learn about management, and it’s a considerably different skill than technical innovation or vision. When a company is going through such fast growth, there isn’t enough time to learn about management - you need managers who already have the experience, and even then it’s a big challenge to keep a company on course. It was unrealistic to expect Marc to set technical direction, manage a big development organization and also be the public face of the company at the same time. That’s true of most people, and more so of someone who’s just starting out in business. I wonder what role that played in the eventual dissolution/sale of Netscape to AOL.

Subsequently, I was surprised that Marc started Loudcloud to provide outsourced IT services. If his skill set was technical innovation, he didn’t sound like a good fit for a business that’s about sales, operational excellence and cost control. Marc’s fame was helpful in getting press attention, but I doubt he had the time, inclination or skill set to be a feet-on-the-street salesperson, and I don’t see how his other skills would have helped.

So was Marc a one-hit wonder? He led the development of NCSA Mosaic. He founded Netscape, which improved upon Mosaic and spurred Microsoft to action, but Netscape ultimately failed as a company. Subsequent efforts, such as Loudcloud, seem to have have fizzled.

After listening to Marc talk yesterday, I’d conclude he was not a one-hit wonder. The problem is more in how we tend to create heroes with images that are impossible to live up to. Marc seems to be an idea person. He gets excited about technical directions and pursues them, but he’s often wrong. (He thought Java was the future for cross-platform application development tool, but “write once, run anywhere” became “write once, debug everywhere” as Java on PCs failed to live up to its promise.) What differentiates him from others is that he has more ideas and from time to time he is right. When a technology like Java doesn’t live up to its stated goal, he’s open to thinking about how to change it, as Netscape did by coming up with Javascript. It was evident listening to him talk about PHP and Ruby that he’s still engaged in tracking technologies and coming up with ideas about how things might and ought to evolve.

So who is Marc? He seems to be a smart, innovative thinker who is good at developing new software and talking to the press. He had an important role in the popularization of the Internet. But he can’t spin straw into gold. There’s more to business success than strength in a couple of areas, and one-time success is hard to replicate. The press and all of us who are influenced by it would do well to remember that the next time someone is hailed as a technology and business visionary and leader.

One final thought - after years of reading articles about Marc, I learned more about him as a person and a technologist in one 45-minute podcast than the sum of all I had read before. A couple of days later I listened to Dan Bricklin talk about his long history recording audio, and he had the same thought: there’s something quite powerful about the spoken word that changes the way that people are listened to and perceived.

Is my impression accurate? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s certainly not complete. At best it represents a portion of the whole picture. But it is remarkable how much one can observe about a person when hearing them speak.

Posted by Roger Greene | Permalink
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I’m glad to see in today’s Wall St. Journal that a determined group of software developers and others from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure are successfully fighting a lobbying effort to create a European software patent court. If software is going to continue to be a dynamic, high-growth industry, driving productivity and economic growth, innovation can’t be constrained by companies with patents who effectively block other companies’ development through the threat of litigation.

Software innovation tends to happen in small companies, who have no budget for legal battles. The U.S. government has already made the mistake of allowing too many and overly broad software patents, which has transferred more power to the largest software companies, which tend to be U.S.-based. The last thing that Europe (or the U.S.) needs is to further that shift by providing another lever for the large companies to take advantage of. Competition between software vendors is spurs steady increases in quality and improvements in functionality and user experience. Software patents do the opposite – they lead to entrenched forces with no need to invest significantly in increasing value for the user.

Software is not a commodity, nor is its functionality easily replicated by a separate team starting from scratch. It’s hard to write good software, and the fact that someone else has already done so doesn’t make it that much easier. Innovators are protected by copyright laws. Patent laws protect the large and powerful, and hurt those who drive software innovation.

Europe, please listen to the voices of FFII and others who really care about innovation. Stay away from enabling patents. Instead, create an environment in which it’s easy for small companies to form and operate. That’s how to support your software industry.

Posted by Roger Greene | Permalink
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In my first couple of jobs, company values were posted on the wall for all to read. I found this somewhat heavy-handed, or akin to Soviet era propaganda exhorting the masses to be inspired and act appropriately. The values seemed like something detached from the everyday workings of the company; they were trotted out from time to time, but did not have much impact one way or the other.

Over the years since then, my perspective has changed, and I’ve come to understand the importance of defining and communicating values.

When we first talked about codifying our values several years ago, we concluded it was worth the effort because it would present a clear message to prospective employees about the kind of work environment we had, and the kind of people we wanted to work with. At that point we had already been in existence for a number of years, and had built up an implicit set of values. We wanted to hire people who shared those values, and concluded the best way to do that was to make the values explicit. That made it clear to potential employees what kind of work environment we had and wanted to foster. The result has been wonderful; we’ve consistently hired bright, ambitious, nice people who enjoy being around others like them. That’s made us stronger as a company and helped us retain talent for many years.

Values are important for more than recruiting, though. They also help keep a company on track. A company, after all, is made up of individuals, whose individual acts sometimes stray from the company’s stated values. When that happens in a company with strongly held values, employees will start to notice and speak up. Managers can then step in, reinforce desired behavior, and keep the company from diverging from its values.

At Ipswitch we recently updated our values, shortening and simplifying the list. Here is the result:

• Honesty
• Integrity
• Teamwork
• Seek Diversity
• Maximize Leverage
• Minimize Bureaucracy
• Life Balance
• Community Impact

One question that comes up in thinking about a company’s values is why all companies don’t have the same set. After all, how many companies would not consider honesty and integrity to be important? But when you think about it, companies really do vary quite a bit in culture, and each culture reflects a different set of values. Some companies focus on taking no prisoners (Microsoft, Oracle), others on technical innovation (Sony, Google), with many other variations.

Once values are defined, though, I’m still not a fan of plastering them throughout the workplace. The way values should be communicated is through the consistent action of managers, who should reinforce company values in all that they do, and in how they manage their staff. That’s what we strive to do, and we’re proud of the culture that results.

Posted by Roger Greene | Permalink
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